Berryman’s Sonnets Read Online Free PDF Page A

under
    Hell-ladled morning, some of my hopes revive:
    . . Less nakedly malign—loblolly—dull
    Eyes on our end . . a table crumples, things
    Jump and fuse, a fat voice calls down the sky,
    ‘Too excitable! too sensitive! thin-skull,
    I am for you: I shrive your wanderings:
    Stand closer, evil, till I pluck your sigh.’

[ 36 ]
    Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when
    You kiss. All silly time else, close them to;
    Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue
    In darkness me, as I do you again
    Instantly we part . . only me both then
    And when your fingers fall, let there be two
    Only, ‘in that dream-kingdom’: I would have you
    Me alone recognize your citizen.
    Before who wanted eyes, making love, so?
    I do now. However we are driven and hide,
    What state we keep all other states condemn,
    We see ourselves, we watch the solemn glow
    Of empty courts we kiss in . . Open wide!
    You do, you do, and I look into them.

[ 37 ]
    Sigh as it ends … I keep an eye on your
    Amour with Scotch,—too cher to consummate;
    Faster your disappearing beer than late-
    ly mine; your naked passion for the floor;
    Your hollow leg; your hanker for one more
    Dark as the Sundam Trench; how you dilate
    Upon psychotics of this class, collate
    Stages, and . . how long since you, well, forbore.
    Ah, but the high fire sings on to be fed
    Whipping our darkness by the lifting sea
    A while, O darling drinking like a clock.
    The tide comes on: spare, Time, from what you spread
    Her story,—tilting a frozen Daiquiri,
    Blonde, barefoot, beautiful,
           flat on the bare floor rivetted to Bach.

[ 38 ]
    Musculatures and skulls. Later some throng
    Before a colonnade, eagle on goose
    Clampt in an empty sky, time’s mild abuse
    In cracks clear down the fresco print; among
    The exaggeration of poses and the long
    Dogged perspective, difficult to choose
    The half-forgotten painter’s lost excuse:
    A vanished poet crowned by the Duke for song.
    Yours crownless, though he keep four hundred years
    To be mocked so, will not be sorry if
    Some of you keeps, grey eyes, your dulcet lust . .
    So the old fiction fools us on, Hope steers
    Rather us lickerish towards some hieroglyph
    Than whelms us home, loinless and sleepy dust.

[ 39 ]
    And does the old wound shudder open? Shall
    I nurse again my days to a girl’s sight,
    Feeling the bandaged and unquiet night
    Slide? Writhe in silly ecstasy? Banal
    Greetings rehearse till a quotidian drawl
    Carols a promise? Stoop an acolyte
    Who stood my master? Must my blood flow bright,
    Childish, I chilled and darkened? Strong pulse crawl?
    I see I do, it must, trembling I see
    Grace of her switching walk away from me
    Fastens me where I stop now, smiling pain;
    And neither pride don nor the fever shed
    More, till the furor when we slide to bed,
    Trying calenture for the raving brain.

[ 40 ]
    Marble nor monuments whereof then we spoke
    We speak of more; spasmodic as the wasp
    About my windowpane, our short songs rasp—
    Not those alone before their singers choke—
    Our sweetest; none hopes now with one smart stroke
    Or whittling years to crack away the hasp
    Across the ticking future; all our grasp
    Cannot beyond the butt secure its smoke.
    A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled.
    We dinch ‘eternal numbers’ and go out.
    We understand exactly what we are.
    . . Do we? Argent I craft you as the star
    Of flower-shut evening: who stays on to doubt
    I sang true? ganger with trobador and scald!

[ 41 ]
    And Plough-month peters out . . its thermal power
    Squandered in sighs and poems and hopeless thought,
    Which corn and honey, wine, soap, wax, oil ought
    Upon my farmling to have chivvied into flower.
    I burn, not silly with remorse, in sour
    Flat heat of the dying month I stretch out taut:
    Twenty-four dawns the topaz woman wrought
    To smile to me is gone. These days devour
    Memory: what were you elbowed on your side?
    Supine, your knee flexed? do I hear your words
    Faint as a nixe, in our grove, saying farewells? .