77 Dream Songs by John Berryman Read Free Book Online Page A

closer for a second look
    and performed their friendly operations there.
    Refreshed, the bark rejoiced.
    Seasons went and came.
    Leaves fell, but only a few.
    Something remarkable about this
    unshedding bulky bole-proudblue-green moist
    thing made by savage & thoughtful
    surviving Henry
    began to strike the passers from despair
    so that sore on their shoulders old men hoisted
    six-foot sons and polished women called
    small girls to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting tree!

76
    Henry’s Confession
    Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
    How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,
    terms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety.
    Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
    what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
    — If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
    in a modesty of death I join my father
    who dared so long agone leave me.
    A bullet on a concrete stoop
    close by a smotheringsouthern sea
    spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
    —You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
    I offers you this handkerchief, now set
    your left foot by my right foot,
    shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
    arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
    hum a little, Mr Bones.
    —I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.

77
    Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world
    & shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up
    and p.a.’d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand
    moment to Henry, ah to those less & none.
    Wif a book of his in either hand
    he is stript down to move on.
    —Come away, Mr Bones.
    —Henry is tired of the winter,
    & haircuts, & a squeamish comfy     ruin-prone proud national mind,     & Spring (in thecity so called).
    Henry likes Fall.
    Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll
    for ever, impenitent Henry.
    But the snows and summers grieve & dream;
    thése fierce & airy occupations, and love,
    raved away so many of Henry’s years
    it is a wonder that, with in each hand
    one of his own mad books and all,
    ancient fires for eyes, his head full
    & his heart full, he’s making ready to moveon.

ALSO BY JOHN BERRYMAN
    POETRY
    Poems (1942)
    The Dispossessed (1948)
    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956)
    His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt (1958)
    Berryman’s Sonnets (1967)
    Short Poems (1967)
    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems (1968)
    His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)
    The Dream Songs (1969)
    Love & Fame (1970)
    Delusions, Etc. (1972)
    Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972(1977)
    Collected Poems 1937–1971 (1989)
    The Heart Is Strange (2014)
    PROSE
    Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (1950)
    The Arts of Reading (with Ralph Ross and Allen Tate)(1960)
    Recovery (1973)
    The Freedom of the Poet (1976)
    Berryman’s Shakespeare (1999)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
    Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964 by John Berryman
    Copyright renewed © 1992 by Kate Donahue Berryman
    Introduction copyright © 2014 by Henri Cole
    All rights reserved
    Published in 1964 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    This paperback edition, 2014
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    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53452-3
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    eISBN 9781466879614
    First eBook Edition: September 2014