Berryman’s Sonnets by John Berryman Read Free Book Online Page B

shut.
    Errors of order! Luck lies with the bone,
    Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk
    Your teeth irregular and passionate.

[ 85 ]
    Spendthrift Urethra—Sphincter, frugal one—
    Masters from darkness in your double sway
    Whom favouring either all chaotic stray—
    Adjust us to our love! . . Unlust undone,
    Wave us together out of the running sun
    Suddenly, and rapt from our shore-play,
    My loss your consolation and protégé,
    Down at a stroke whelmed, while the waters run.
    O serious as our play, my nervous plea!
    . . Hallucinatory return to the warm and real
    Dark, still, happy apartment after the riot . .
    Wounded, be well, and sleep sound as the sea
    Vexed in wide night by no wind, but the wheel
    Roils down to zero . . steady . . archaic quiet.

[ 86 ]
    Our lives before bitterly our mistake!—
    We should have been together seething years,
    We should have been the tomb-bat hangs and hears
    Sounds inconceivable, been a new snowflake,
    We should have been the senile world’s one sake,
    Vestigial lovers, tropical and fierce
    Among fatigues and snows, the gangs and queers,
    We should have been the bloom of a cockcrow lake.
    . . A child’s moon, child’s fire!—What I love of you
    Inter alia tingles like a whole good day,
    A hard wind, or a Strad’s consummate pluck,
    Proficient, full and strong, shrewd as the blue
    Profound sky, pale as a winter sky you lay
    And with these breasts whiter than stars gave suck.

[ 87 ]
    Is it possible, poor kids, you must not come out?
    Care for you none but Lise, to whom you cry?
    Here in my small book must you dance, then die?
    Rain nor sun greet you first, no friendly shout?
    If the army stands, moves not ahead one scout?
    Sits all your army ever still, small fry?
    And never to all your letters one reply?
    No echo back, your games go on without?
    Dignity under these conditions few
    I feel might muster steadily, and you
    Jitterbug more than you pavanne, poor dears . .
    Only you seem to want to hunt the whole
    House through, scrutators of the difficult soul
    Native here—and pomp’s not for pioneers.

[ 88 ]
    Anomalous I linger, and ignore
    My blue conviction she will now not come
    Whose grey eyes blur before me like some sum
    A shifting riddle to fatigue . . I pore . .
    Faster they flicker, and flag, moving on slower,
    And I move with them—who am I? a scum
    Thickens on a victim, a delirium
    Begins to mutter, which I must explore.
    O rapt as Monteverdi’s ‘. . note . . note . .’
    I glide aroused—a rumour? or a dream?
    An actual lover? Elmo’s light? erlking?
    —‘I know very well who I am’ said Don Quixote.
    The sourceless lightning laps my stare, the stream
    Backs through the wood, the cosy spiders cling.

[ 89 ]
    ‘If long enough I sit here, she, she’ll pass.’
    This fatuous, and suffering-inversion,
    And Donne-mimetic, O and true assertion
    Tolls through my hypnagogic mind; alas
    I hang upon this threshold of plate-glass,
    Dry and dull eyes, in the same weird excursion
    As from myself our love-months are, some Persian
    Or Aztec supersession—the land mass
    Extruded first from the archaic sea,
    Whereon a desiccation, and species died
    Except the one somehow learnt to breathe air:
    Unless my lungs adapt me to despair,
    I’ll nod off into the increasing, wide,
    Marvellous sleep my hope lets herald me.

[ 90 ]
    For you an idyl, was it not, so far,
    Flowing and inconvulsive pastoral,
    I suddenly made out tonight as, all
    The pallor of your face lost like a star,
    It clenched and darkened in your avatar,
    The goddess grounded. Lovers’ griefs appal
    Women, who with their honey brook their gall
    And succor as they can the men they mar.
    Down-soft my joy in the beginning, O
    Dawn-disenchanted since, I hardly remember
    The useful urine-retentive years I sped.
    —I said as little as I could, sick; know
    Your strange heart works; wish us into September
    Only alive, and lovers, and abed.

[ 91 ]
    Itself a lightning-flash ripping the ‘dark
    Backward’