John Berryman

Dream Song 23: The Lay of Ike

This is the lay of Ike.
Here's to the glory of the Grewt White—awk—
who has been running—er—er—things in recent—ech—
in the United—If your screen is black,
ladies & gentlemen, we—I like—
at the Point he was already terrific—sick

to a second term, having done no wrong—
no right—no · right—having let the Army—bang—
defend itself from Joe, let venom' Strauss
bile Oppenheimer out of use—use Robb,
who'll later fend for Goldfine—Breaking no laws,
he lay in the White House—sob!!—

who never understood his own strategy—whee—

that never lost a vote (O Adlai mine).

so Monty's memoirs—nor any strategy,
wanting the ball bulled thro' all parts of the line
at once—proving, by his refusal to take Berlin,
he misread even Clauswitz—wide empty grin

John Berryman (also Delmore Schwartz)

 

with four year old daughter

Dream Song 149

'This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be anymore. Can Delmore die?
I don’t suppose
in all them years a day ever went by
without a loving thought for him. Welladay.
In the brightness of his promise,

unstained, I saw him thro’ the mist of the actual
blazing with insight, warm with gossip
thro’ all our Harvard years
when both of us were just becoming known
I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is TREF
and grief too astray for tears.

I imagine you have heard the terrible news,
that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,
in New York: he sang me a song
‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz
Harms and the child I sing, two parents’ torts’
when he was young and gift-strong.'

Delmore Schwartz

 

                                              

                                                                                                Gertrude Buckman, Cambridge, ca. 1945

In The Naked Bed, In Plato's Cave

In the naked bed, in Plato's cave, 
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
                     Hearing the milkman's clop,
his striving up the stair, the bottle's chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window. The stony street
Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,
The street-lamp's vigil and the horse's patience.
The winter sky's pure capital
Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.

Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose
Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves' waterfalls,
Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.
A car coughed, starting. Morning softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
Again and again,
                     while history is unforgiven.

Sylvia Plath

with Frida and Nicolas

Cut

What a thrill -
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.  A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man -

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump -
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

Delmore Schwartz

Washington Square Park,1961

Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

Robert Lowell

 

After The Surprising Conversions

September twenty-second, Sir: today 
I answer. In the latter part of May, 
Hard on our Lord’s Ascension, it began 
To be more sensible. A gentleman 
Of more than common understanding, strict 
In morals, pious in behavior, kicked 
Against our goad. A man of some renown, 
An useful, honored person in the town, 
He came of melancholy parents; prone 
To secret spells, for years they kept alone— 
His uncle, I believe, was killed of it: 
Good people, but of too much or little wit. 
I preached one Sabbath on a text from Kings; 
He showed concernment for his soul. Some things 
In his experience were hopeful. He 
Would sit and watch the wind knocking a tree 
And praise this countryside our Lord has made. 
Once when a poor man’s heifer died, he laid 
A shilling on the doorsill; though a thirst 
For loving shook him like a snake, he durst 
Not entertain much hope of his estate 
In heaven. Once we saw him sitting late 
Behind his attic window by a light 
That guttered on his Bible; through that night 
He meditated terror, and he seemed 
Beyond advice or reason, for he dreamed 
That he was called to trumpet Judgment Day 
To Concord. In the latter part of May 
He cut his throat. And though the coroner 
Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir 
Palsied our village. At Jehovah’s nod 
Satan seemed more let loose amongst us: God 
Abandoned us to Satan, and he pressed 
Us hard, until we thought we could not rest 
Till we had done with life. Content was gone. 
All the good work was quashed. We were undone. 
The breath of God had carried out a planned 
And sensible withdrawal from this land; 
The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, 
Once neither callous, curious nor devout, 
Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned 
At it in its familiar twang: “My friend, 
Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!” 
September twenty-second, Sir, the bough 
Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn 
The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

Anne Sexton

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

- 

Anne Sexton

All My Pretty Ones

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,   

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber   

you from the residence you could not afford:   

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,   

the love and legal verbiage of another will,   

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,   

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...   

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy   

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.   

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile   

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.   

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.   

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly   

as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran   

the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me

and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went   

down and recent years where you went flush   

on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant   

to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.   

But before you had that second chance, I cried   

on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.   

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,   

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,   

running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;   

here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;   

and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.   

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,   

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept   

for three years, telling all she does not say   

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day   

with your blood, will I drink down your glass   

of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years   

goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.   

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.   

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you

Hornet

A red-hot needle
hangs out of him, he steers by it
as if it were a rudder, he
would get in the house any way he could
and then he would bounce from window
to ceiling, buzzing and looking for you.
Do not sleep for he is there wrapped in the curtain.
Do not sleep for he is there under the shelf.
Do not sleep for he wants to sew up your skin,
he want to leap into your body like a hammer
with a nail, do not sleep he wants to get into
your nose and make a transplant, he wants do not
sleep he wants to bury your fur and make
a nest of knives, he wants to slide under your
fingernail and push in a splinter, do not sleep
he wants to climb out of the toilet when you sit on it
and make a home in the embarrassed hair do not sleep
he wants you to walk into him as into a dark fire.

 

Anne Sexton

Alfred Sexton, Linda Gray Sexton, Joyce Ladd Sexton 

Ringing the Bells

And this is the way they ring
the bells in Bedlam
and this is the bell-lady
who comes each Tuesday morning 
to give us a music lesson
and because the attendants make you go
and because we mind by instinct,
like bees caught in the wrong hive,
we are the circle of crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,
who points at my hand
that holds my bell, E flat,
and this is the gray dress next to me
who grumbles as if it were special
to be old, to be old,
and this is the small hunched squirrel girl
on the other side of me
who picks at the hairs over her lip,
who picks at the hairs over her lip all day,
and this is how the bells really sound,
as untroubled and clean
as a workable kitchen,
and this is always my bell responding
to my hand that responds to the lady
who points at me, E flat;
and although we are not better for it,
they tell you to go. And you do.

Anne Sexton

A Curse Against Elegies

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?
I am tired of all your pious talk.
Also, I am tired of all the dead.
They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:
the last empty fifth of booze,
the rusty nails and chicken feathers
that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,
the worms that lived under the cat's ear
and the thin-lipped preacher
who refused to call
except once on a flea-ridden day
when he came scuffing in through the yard
looking for a scapegoat.
I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you — you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams. 

Sylvia Plath

 

Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us.

-----from "Medusa"

Sylvia Plath

  

Sheep In Fog

The hills step off into whiteness. 
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells -
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Sylvia Plath

photograph by Rollie MacKenna, 1959 

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.   

Waxy stalactites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.   

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,   

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium   

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish—

Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,   

A piranha   

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.   

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?   

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,   

Your crossed position.   

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.   

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses,   

With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.   

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric   

Atoms that cripple drip   

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.   

You are the baby in the barn.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

                                    Photograph by Carl. Van Vechten, 1933.

Conscientious Objector

 

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

“I think I should have loved you presently”

• Twitter
 
• Facebook
 
• Print

I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.

John Berryman

  Sonnet 115

 

All we were going strong last night this time,

the mosts were flying & the frozen daiquiris

were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise

listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,

my head was frantic with a following rime:

it was a good evening, and evening to please,

I kissed her in the kitchen—ecstasies—

among so much good we tamped down the crime.

 

The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,

as I made for the grove, without expectation,

some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,

to read her if she came. Presently the sun

yellowed the pines & my lady came not

in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.