Eleven Addresses to the Lord

  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.

Song #149

This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die?
I don't suppose
in all them years a day went ever 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 & the child I sing, two parents' torts'
when he was young & gift-strong.

Song #157

Ten Songs, one solid block of agony,
I wrote for him, and then I wrote no more.
His sad ghost must aspire
free of my love to its own past, that ghost,
among its fellows, Mozart's, Bach's, Delmore's
free of its careful body

high in the shades which line the avenue
where I will gladly walk, beloved of one,
and listen to the Buddha.
His work downhill, I don't conceal from you,
ran and ran out. The brain shook as if stunned,
I hope he's over that,

flame may his glory in that other place,
for he was fond of fame, devoted to it,
and every first-rate soul
has sacrifices which it puts in play,
I hope he's sitting with his peers: sit, sit,
& recover & be whole.

Song #36

The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there?
--Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side.
I smell your grief.
--I sent my grief away. I cannot care
forever. With them all again & again I died
and cried, and I have to live.

--Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.
That is our `pointed task. Love & die.
--Yes; that makes sense.
But what makes sense between, then? What if I
roiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and
just sat on the fence?

--I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost.
--It's fool's gold. But I go in for that.
The boy & the bear
looked at each other. Man all is tossed
& lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat.
William Faulkner's where?

(Frost being still around)

Song #34

My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide
in the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried
to his trigger-digit, pal.
He should not have done that, but, I guess,
he didn't feel the best, Sister, - feel less
and more about less than us ... ?

Now - tell me, my love, if you recall
the dove light after dawn at the island and all --
here is the story, Jack:
he verbed for forty years, very enough,
& shot & buckt -- and, baby, there was of
schist but small there (some).

Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back --
in the taxi too, sick --
silent -- it's so I broke down here, in his mind
whose sire as mine one same way -- I refuse,
hoping the guy go home.

Dream Songs

mp3: Aloha - Light Works

I am synched up to my friend on the other coast as we coast through this paper and I just finished The Square and I just read the first of John Berryman's Dream Songs cycle and here right now I want to kill pitchfork for not covering Aloha's new EP "Light Works". Aloha destroyed me in June with Brace Your Face, it was brutal on the mad-crazy alternating your life away to a free-deathbound-way. Things changed. But here they are trying to sell themselves out straight on the indie rockdom with very acoustic, very jammy ta-da ta-da ta-da overload. But it's good because it's bracing me away from the face that had the empty box of wine on it turned upside down. I love the earnestness in their sound.

Aloha -

Op. posth. no. 14

Noises from underground made gibber some
others collected & dug Henry up
saying 'You are a sight.'
Chilly, he muttered for a double rum
waving the mikes away, putting a stop
to rumors, pushing his fright

off with the now accumulated taxes
accustomed in his way to solitude
and no bills.
Wives came forward, claiming a new Axis,
fearful for their insurance, though, now, glued
to disencumbered Henry's many ills


A fortnight later, sense a single man
upon the trampled scene at 2 a.m.
insomnia-plagued, with a shovel
digging like mad, Lazarus with a plan
to get his own back, a plan, a stratagem
no newsman will unravel.

John Berryman

Thanks to Marcel for introducing me to this gem:

John Berryman - Dream Song No. 28

Snow Line

It was wet & white & swift and where I am
we don't know. It was dark and then
it isn't.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be to eat
nothing. I am unusually tired.
I'm alone too.

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I'd say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.
Where are his notes I loved?
There may be horribles; it's hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.