Honey, we don’t rejoin.
The thing meanwhile, I suppose, is to be courageous & kind.
Relations
I feel congruity, feel colleagueship
with few even of my fine contemporaries
Cal, Saul, Elizabeth,
modester Meredith, not yet quite good Deneen Peckinpah
inditing a dirty novel in Montreal.
Bhain Campbell was extracted from me
in dolour, yellow as a second sheet
& I have not since tried to resume the same.
Losses! as Randall observed
who walked into a speeding car
under a culvert at night in Carolina
having just called his wife to make plans for the children.
Woe quotidian, woe a crony
glowing on the pillow, talkative.
But dividends too:
Miss Bishop, who wields a mean lyric
since Emily Dickinson only Miss Moore is adroiter,
addressed me in her first letter to me as ‘John’
saying ‘Surely I may? as if we were friends.
I wrote you a fan-letter twenty years ago.’
Among a-many other letters never came.
Antitheses
Dawdling into glory;
or with hammer-strokes.
Our friends have taken both ways.
I’ll put the first way first.
Mooning, wishers,
unable to make up our mind like a practical man
about anything.
The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn’t match.
Only—the other path—we are hard-headed.
Victor Hugo (not one of my favourite authors,
except for, in Les Orientales, ‘Les Djinns’)
wrote down each night to the end of his passionate life
the exact sums he paid Joséphine & Héloise.
So: we moon; we tough.
Nobody can make head or tail of us.
Plato threw us out.
Freud threw out a hint about Leonardo . .
International art: . . I feel friendly to the idea
but skeptical.
I live at 33 Arthur Ave. S.E.
& mostly write from here.
My rocking-chair is dark blue, it’s in one corner
& swivels, as my thought drifts.
My wife’s more expensive patchquilt rocker
is five feet away & does not swivel.
Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks
(14,500 six-ton concrete-&-steel vaults of nerve-gas rockets, lethal)
The terrible trains crawl seaward thro’ the South,
where TV teams quiz small-town citizens:
‘Waal … if the Army says it’s safe, it’s okay with me.
Ah’ve got a boy in Veetnam.’
All this mad stuff has been there fifteen years!
leaking its coffins. Had the Chinese come
down in Korea, who knows? then or now knows?
Nobody knows anything
but somewhere up in the murky constellation
of Government & the scientists & the military
responsible to no-one someone knows
that he too doesn’t know anything
and can’t say what would then have happened or will ‘now’ happen
on the Atlantic bottom in the long dark
of decades of ecology to come
while the 20th Century flies insanely on.
To a Woman
The problem is urgent, yes, for this hot light
we so love may not last.
Man seems to be darkening himself;
you must still for some & the other depend on him,
but perhaps essentially now it is your turn.
Your three sons, your political career,
your husband’s legal work & fervency in bed,
your story-writing, your great bodily freshness
at thirty-one now, yes, for the problem is urgent
as a spasm of diarrhoea.
You must perhaps both pray for & abandon
your peculiar strength of patience,
daring daily more or all.
Oddly crowned with a solitary ailanthus,
the tortured red hills to this hot light swell with pride.
A Huddle of Need
I wondered about their things. Were they large or small?
Sensitive, or not?
Reddish, or otherwise?
Then I undertook research in this subject.
No woman I ever came on was satisfied with them.
Too large! Too small!
But O my thin small darling, they are yours.
Woe the Toltecs, & everything is forgotten
almost but stately terraces. I think so, and
the terrors of the knife.
Maybe the sex of the knife made a difference.
I will say: I have been wrong.
And God settled the Jews in Odessa
when he might have put them in Jerusalem
I go now this far, in the Book of Babel.
I seldom now go out. She’s out of town.
After all has been said, and all has been said,
Man is a huddle of need.
Having explained so much, I close my mouth.
Damned
Damned. Lost & damned. And I find I’m pregnant.
It must have been in a shuffle of disrobing
or shortly after.
I confess: I don’t know what to do.
She wept steadily all thro’ the performance.
As soon as I tucked it in she burst into tears.
She had a small mustache but was otherwise gifted,
riding, & crying her heart out.
(She had been married two years) I was amazed.
(Her first adultery) I was scared & guilty.
I said ‘What are you crying for, darling? Don’t.’
She stuttered something & wept on.
She came again & again, twice ejecting me
over her heaving. I turned my head aside
to avoid her goddamned tears,
getting in my beard.
I am busy tired mad lonely & old.
O this has been a long long night of wrest.
I saw her once again: on a busy sidewalk
outside a grocery store
& she was big & I did not say ‘Is it mine?’
I congratulated her.
Brighter it waxeth; it’s almost seven.
Of Suicide
Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me.
I drink too much. My wife threatens separation.
She won’t ‘nurse’ me. She feels ‘inadequate’.
We don’t mix together.
It’s an hour later in the East.
I could call up Mother in Washington, D.C.
But could she help me?
And all this postal adulation & reproach?
A basis rock-like of love & friendship
for all this world-wide madness seems to be needed.
Epictetus is in some ways my favourite philosopher.
Happy men have died earlier.
I still plan to go to Mexico this summer.
The Olmec images! Chichén Itzá!
D. H. Lawrence has a wild dream of it.
Malcolm Lowry’s book when it came out I taught to my precept at Princeton.
I don’t entirely resign. I may teach the Third Gospel
this afternoon. I haven’t made up my mind.
It seems to me sometimes that others have easier jobs
& do them worse.
Well, we must labour & dream. Gogol was impotent,
somebody in Pittsburgh told me.
I said: At what age? They couldn’t answer.
That is a damned serious matter.
Rembrandt was sober. There we differ. Sober.
Terrors came
on him. To us too they come.
Of suicide I continually think.
Apparently he didn’t. I’ll teach Luke.
Dante’s Tomb
A tired banana & an empty mind
at 7 a.m. My world offends my eyes
bleary as an envelope cried-over
after the letter’s lost.
In spite of it all, both it & me,
I’ll chip away at the mystery.
There’s a Toltec warrior in Minneapolis
with narrow eyes, reclining.
The head raised & facing you;
larger than life-size, in tan granite.
The cult perished.
The empty city welcomed the monkeys.
We don’t know. Hundreds & hundreds of little poems
rolled up & tied with ribbons
over the virgin years, ‘unwanted love’.
And Miss Bishop’s friend has died,
and I will die and one day in Ravenna
I visited his tomb. A domed affair,
forbidding & tight shut.
‘Dantis Poetae Sepulchrum.’
She said to me, half-strangled, ‘Do that again.
And then do the other thing.’
Sunlight flooded the old room
& I was both sleepy & hungry.
Despair
It seems to be D A R K all the time.
I have difficulty walking.
I can remember what to say to my seminar
but I don’t know that I want to.
I said in a Song once: I am unusually tired.
I repeat that & increase it.
I’m vomiting.
I broke down today in the slow movement of K.365.
I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.
I wrote: ‘There may be horribles.’
I increase that.
(I think she took her little breasts away.)
I am in love with my excellent baby.
Crackles! in darkness HOPE; & disappears.
Lost arts.
Vanishings.
Walt! We’re downstairs,
even you don’t comfort me
but I join your risk my dear friend & go with you.
There are no matches
Utter, His Father, one word
The Hell Poem
Hospital racket, nurses’ iron smiles.
Jill & Eddie Jane are the souls.
I like nearly all the rest of them too
except for when they feed me paraldehyde.
Tyson has been here three heavy months;
heroin. We have the same doctor: She’s improving,
let out on pass tonight for her first time.
A madonna’s oval face with wide dark eyes.
Everybody is jolly, patients, nurses,
orderlies, some psychiatrists. Anguishes;
gnawings. Protractions of return
to the now desired but frightful outer world.
Young Tyson hasn’t eaten since coming back.
She went to a wedding, her mother harangued her
it was all much too much for her
she sipped wine with a girl-friend, she fled here.
Many file down for shock & can’t say after
whether they ate breakfast. Dazed till four.
One word is: the memory will come back.
Ah, weeks or months. Maybe.
Behind the locked door, called ‘back there’,
the worse victims.
Apathy or ungovernable fear
cause them not to watch through the window starlight.
They can’t have matches, or telephone. They slob food.
Tantrums, & the suicidal, are put back there.
Sometimes one is promoted here. We are ecstatic.
Sometimes one has to go back.
It’s all girls this time. The elderly, the men,
of my former stays have given way to girls,
fourteen to forty, raucous, racing the halls,
cursing their paramours & angry husbands.
Nights of witches: I dreamt a headless child.
Sobbings, a scream, a slam.
Will day glow again to these tossers, and to me?
I am staying days.
Death Ballad
(‘I don’t care’)
Tyson & Jo, Tyson & Jo
became convinced it was no go
& decided to end it all
at nineteen,—on the psychiatric ward.
Trouble is, Tyson was on the locked ward,
Jo for some reason on the open
and they were forbidden to communicate
either their love or their hate.
Heroin & the cops were Tyson’s bit
I don’t know just what Jo’s was, ah but it
was more self-destructive still.
She tried to tear a window & screen out.
United in their feel of worthlessness
& rage, they stood like sisters in their way
blocking their path. They made a list
of the lies of Society & glared: ‘We don’t exist.’
The charismatic quality of these charming & sensitive girls
smiled thro’ their vices; all were fond of them
& wished them well.
They sneered: ‘We prefer Hell.’
What will their fates be? Put their heads together,
in their present mental weather,
no power can prevent their dying. That is so.
Only, Jo & Tyson, Tyson & Jo,
take up, outside your blocked selves, some small thing
that is moving
& wants to keep on moving
& needs therefore, Tyson, Jo, your loving.
‘I Know’
Revelations every two hours on the Lounge.
So Hilary 17 tried suicide.
She goes barefooted & quizzically laughs.
There seems nothing wrong with her.
Her father found her. At the hospital they shot her several times in the hip.
A bottle and a half of sleeping pills.
She came out of it, not even nauseated;
‘I have a tough stomach.’
O Tyson: ‘I don’t think any more. I know.’
And Bertrand Russell’s little improbable son
said to his teacher, a friend of ours at Princeton,
when they came to ‘two plus two equals four’
piped up ‘My father isn’t sure of that.’
Ah at all levels. Many of the sane
walking the streets like trees
are weirder than my mournful fellow-patients;
they hide it better.
Laana’s husband’s lawyer served papers this afternoon.
That excellent & even noble woman cried as we sat on the Lounge.
The architecture of the locked ward leaves much to be desired.
A private conversation with mad Tyson
infeasible. Jeff, 6′4″, 18, paws my right arm, & cries.
Purgatory
The days are over, I leave after breakfast
with fifteen hundred things to do at home;
I made just now my new priority list.
Who will I miss?
Paul Bauer at 3 a.m. with his fine-going story
I cover over with him word by word
controlling the reader to do half the work
but forcing each sentence-series interesting?
Marcia, 15, tall, with her sweet shy grin
& low-voiced question
‘Do you think I belong here like the others?’
against the piano, the pool- & ping-pong tables?
Greg who wandered into my room at midnight
& rehearsed to me (exhausted)
with finite iteration & wild pauses
his life-story? He retired two years ago
& hasn’t had a good day or a good night since.
Some of the rest? Yes, yes! except for the black lady
who told us on Wednesday morning in the Group
she was going to suicide between 62 and 67.
Arrogant, touchy, vain, self-pitying, & insolent:
I haven’t been spoken to so for thirteen years.
In print of course they insult you, & who cares? But in person?
O no I won’t miss her. But Mrs Massey,
long widowed, long retired, toothpick-thin,
grew bored, & manages, with a withered smile
for each sole patient, our downstairs dining-room
at the evening eat. We have been friends for years
on my returnings, her survival. Late in a dinner
she stops by whatever table I am at
& bends over: ‘Mr Berryman, was everything all right?’
Tonight though she touched my elbow afterward
as I was bearing my cleared tray to the rack:
‘It gives me honour to serve a man like you,
would you sometime write me out a verse or two & sign it?’
O my brave dear lady, yes I will.
This is it.
I certainly will miss at 6:25 p.m. you.
And if you can carry on so, so maybe can I.
Heaven
Free! while in the cathedral at Seville
a Cardinal is singing. I bowed my face
& licked the monument. Aged women
waited behind me. Free! to lick & believe,
Free free! on an Easter afternoon
I almost said I loved her, we held hands
in the cemetery. Choirs came down on us,
St Anselm bothered his ecstatic repose to chide.
Ambrose interpreted: I was in love with her,
she was half with me. Among the tombs.
She married before she died,
a lissom light-haired alluring phantastic young lady.
Fly by, spirits of Night, her cenotaph
& forgive my survival with one shoe.
She forgave me that golden day whatever yen—
but what might forgive her loss?
Allow her exalted kind forbidding voice
a place in the Lachrymosa.
Let her sing on.
O lucky spirits to sing on with her.
Then a capella: mourning, barely heard,
across the Venetian waters: louder, dear,
I have a 15% hearing loss from a childhood illness,
louder, my darling, over at San Giorgio.
The Home Ballad
We must work & play and John Jacob Niles