John Berryman

I lift—lift you five States away your glass, Wide of this bar you never graced, where none Ever I know came, where what work is done Even by these men I know not, where a brass Police-car sign peers in, wet strange cars pass, Soiled hangs the rag of day out over this town, A juke-box brains air where I drink alone, The spruce barkeep sports a toupee alas— My glass I lift at six o'clock, my darling, As you plotted . . Chinese couples shift in bed, We shared today not even filthy weather, Beasts in the hills their tigerish love are snarling, Suddenly they clash, I blow my short ash red, Grey eyes light! and we have our drink together.

I put those things there.—See them burn. The emerald the azure and the gold Hiss and crack, the blues & greens of the world As if I were tired. Someone interferes Everywhere with me. The clouds, the clouds are torn In ways I do not understand or love. Licking my long lips, I looked upon God And he flamed and he was friendlier Than you were, and he was small. Showing me Serpents and thin flowers; these were cold. Dominion waved & glittered like the flare From ice under a small sun. I wonder. Afterward the violent and formal dancers Came out, shaking their pithless heads. I would instruct them but I cannot now,— Because of the elements. They rise and move, I nod a dance and they dance in the rain In my red coat. I am the king of the dead.

(Jamestown 1957) It kissed us, soft, to cut our throats, this coast, like a malice of the lazy King. I hunt, & hunt! but find here what to kill?—nothing is blunt, but phantoming uneases I find. Ghost on ghost precedes of all most scared us, most we fled. Howls fail upon this secret, far air: grunt, shaming for food; you must. I love the King & it was not I who strangled at the toast but a flux of a free & dying adjutant: God be with him. He & God be with us all, for we are not to live, I cannot wring, like laundry, blue my soul—indecisive thing . . From undergrowth & over odd birds call and who would starv'd so survive? God save the King.

1 Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, inimitable contriver, endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon, thank you for such as it is my gift. I have made up a morning prayer to you containing with precision everything that most matters. ‘According to Thy will’ the thing begins. It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence. You have come to my rescue again & again in my impassable, sometimes despairing years. You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning. Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs: how can I ‘love’ you? I only as far as gratitude & awe confidently & absolutely go. I have no idea whether we live again. It doesn’t seem likely from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view but certainly all things are possible to you, and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter & to Paul as I believe I sit in this blue chair. Only that may have been a special case to establish their initiatory faith. Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement. May I stand until death forever at attention for any your least instruction or enlightenment. I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty. 2 Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you without pretending to know anything about you but infinite capacity everywhere & always & in particular certain goodness to me. Yours is the crumpling, to my sister-in-law terrifying thunder, yours the candelabra buds sticky in Spring, Christ’s mercy, the gloomy wisdom of godless Freud: yours the lost souls in ill-attended wards, those agonized thro’ the world It this instant of time, all evil men, Belsen, Omaha Beach,— incomprehensible to man your ways. May be the Devil after all exists. ‘I don’t try to reconcile anything’ said the poet at eighty, ‘This is a damned strange world.’ Man is ruining the pleasant earth & man. What at last, my Lord, will you allow? Postpone till after my children's deaths your doom if it be thy ineffable, inevitable will. I say ‘Thy kingdom come’, it means nothing to me. Hast Thou prepared astonishments for man? One sudden Coming? Many so believe. So not, without knowing anything, do I. 3 Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting. Forsake me not when my wild hours come; grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams; achieve in me patience till the thing be done, a careful view of my achievement come. Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder. When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey. Empty my heart toward Thee. Let me pace without fear the common path of death. Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter: fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord. Unite my various soul, sole watchman of the wide & single stars. 4 If I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so. Thou art not absent-minded, as I am. I am so much so I had to give up driving. You attend, I feel, to the matters of man. Across the ages certain blessings swarm, horrors accumulate, the best men fail: Socrates, Lincoln, Christ mysterious. Who can search Thee out? except Isaiah & Pascal, who saw. I dare not ask that vision, though a piece of it at last in crisis was vouchsafèd me. I altered then for good, to become yours. Caretaker! take care, for we run in straits. Daily, by night, we walk naked to storm, some threat of wholesale loss, to ruinous fear. Gift us with long cloaks & adrenalin. Who haunt the avenues of Angkor Wat recalling all that prayer, that glory dispersed, haunt me at the corner of Fifth & Hennepin. Shield & fresh fountain! Manifester! Even mine. 5 Holy, & holy. The damned are said to say ‘We never thought we would come into this place.’ I’m fairly clear, my Friend, there’s no such place ordained for inappropriate & evil man. Surely they fall dull, & forget. We too, the more or less just, I feel fall asleep dreamless forever while the worlds hurl out. Rest may be your ultimate gift. Rest or transfiguration! come & come whenever Thou wilt. My daughter & my son fend will without me, when my work is done in Your opinion. Strengthen my widow, let her dream on me thro’ tranquil hours less & down to less. Abrupt elsewhere her heart, I sharply hope. I leave her in wise Hands. 6 Under new management, Your Majesty: Thine. I have solo’d mine since childhood, since my father’s suicide when I was twelve blew out my most bright candle faith, and look at me. I served at Mass six dawns a week from five, adoring Father Boniface & you, memorizing the Latin he explained. Mostly we worked alone. One or two women. Then my poor father frantic. Confusions & afflictions followed my days. Wives left me. Bankrupt I closed my doors. You pierced the roof twice & again. Finally you opened my eyes. My double nature fused in that point of time three weeks ago day before yesterday. Now, brooding thro’ a history of the early Church, I identify with everybody, even the heresiarchs. 7 After a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, Justin Martyr studied the words of the Saviour, finding them short, precise, terrible, & full of refreshment. I am tickled to learn this. Let one day desolate Sherry, fair, thin, tall, at 29 today her life the Sahara Desert, who has never once enjoyed a significant relation, so find His lightning words. A Prayer for the Self Who am I worthless that You spent such pains and take may pains again? I do not understand; but I believe. Jonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze. Induct me down my secrets. Stiffen this heart to stand their horrifying cries, O cushion the first the second shocks, will to a halt in mid-air there demons who would be at me. May fade before, sweet morning on sweet morning, I wake my dreams, my fan-mail go astray, and do me little goods I have not thought of, ingenious & beneficial Father. Ease in their passing my beloved friends, all others too I have cared for in a travelling life, anyone anywhere indeed. Lift up sober toward truth a scared self-estimate. 9 Surprise me on some ordinary day with a blessing gratuitous. Even I’ve done good beyond their expectations. What count we then upon Your bounty? Interminable: an old theologian asserts that even to say You exist is misleading. Uh-huh. I buy that Second-century fellow. I press his withered glorifying hand. You certainly do not as I exist, impersonating as well the meteorite & flaring in your sun your waterfall or blind in caves pallid fishes. Bear in mind me, Who have forgotten nothing, & Who continues. I may not foreknow & fail much to remember. You sustain imperial desuetudes, at the kerb a widow. 10 Fearful I peer upon the mountain path where once Your shadow passed, Limner of the clouds up their phantastic guesses. I am afraid, I never until now confessed. I fell back in love with you, Father, for two reasons: You were good to me, & a delicious author, rational & passionate. Come on me again, as twice you came to Azarias & Misael. President of the brethren, our mild assemblies inspire, & bother the priest not to be dull; keep us week-long in order; love my children, my mother far & ill, far brother, my spouse. Oil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation I sweat out my wayward works. Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ. Let me lie down exhausted, content with that. 11 Germanicus leapt upon the wild lion in Smyrna, wishing to pass quickly from a lawless life. The crowd shook the stadium. The proconsul marvelled. ‘Eighty & six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no harm. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?’ Polycarp, John’s pupil, facing the fire. Make too me acceptable at the end of time in my degree, which then Thou wilt award. Cancer, senility, mania, I pray I may be ready with my witness.

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 smothering southern 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.

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball. What, what is he to do? I saw it go Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then Merrily over—there it is in the water! No use to say 'O there are other balls': An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down All his young days into the harbour where His ball went. I would not intrude on him, A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now He senses first responsibility In a world of possessions. People will take balls, Balls will be lost always, little boy, And no one buys a ball back. Money is external. He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, The epistemology of loss, how to stand up Knowing what every man must one day know And most know many days, how to stand up And gradually light returns to the street, A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight. Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water Or whistling, I am not a little boy.