Lines for John Berryman

Manuscripts spread across the floor fulfilling a tentative arrangement sure to sock it to the TLS. These

dream songs, still a cat’s-paw title, lay there, pulsating, whispering. Henry at pool, with a good break

and solids a choice. Heady times for Mark Van Doren’s protégé, a premium pick out of Columbia College, this

stumbling, hanging-by-the-fingernail poet, with a too-heavy child, a patient Bradstreet wife, and, alive in this alien

grist mill, way beyond his credit to cash a check at the village pharmacy. A hot-dog poet soon to sink a gusher.

2

Elegy to come, elegy socked away, he suffers visitors, himself all aflame:

“alone in the pool —out of shape— a careless fool— —Roethke.”

Wrapped in flannel, this pipe-stem blows smoke—this poet keens.

3

At various angles to the blackboard, he taught the unities of The WasteLand, filling the room with smoke, a fact not wasted on the Irishman who swept floors and emptied ashtrays.

4

He taught the Book of Luke, rating it right up there with Eliot and Shakespeare, condescending to bring into line (for nuns and some others) the Old Testament and The Waste Land.

5

He had the savant’s air about him but we did not know it He cried out to us to know him for his meter but we did not go to him He lisped in numbers for his own pleasure and shoved it under our noses, but we did nothing but note it He strove precociously long for his britches We miss him on Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael (where other savants display unadorned genius spewing out dates, making music, sculpting horses on wintry afternoons of cloudless snowfall)

our Volpone sitting pretty, un-cobwebbed by memory and stripped down to make waves

6

Hunkered down in West Gloucester, the poet lined up his quarterlies, his reviews, —Southern, Sewanee, Partisan, and Kenyon— each issue a blue-chip— but not a one after ’45.

7

“Poor Berryman jumping from a bridge,”

pities Charlie Citrine (himself adept at jumping claims and time-sharing women).

Saul’s own creation, Pap and his Angel, rustling up popularity, bucks on with his

Nathan Detroit dames high over cloud nine. No black or white or angelic Jew, this

imaginary Henry, ankle-deep in the twin troughs of everybody else’s love and fame.

8

“He was the best one ever,”

recalled the fat lady who ran that spit of store on Benefit fronting the Colonial Apts,

“busting in here three, four, five times a day—and always whiskey, but sometimes wine.”

She, who put a mean dent in a cheese wheel, made him out to be a premier lush,

but she didn’t know about the pills in a jar shipped in, like penny candy, by his

pharmacist back home. She ran his kind of store, bottled booze shelved

two deep along the back wall, pharmaceuticals pushed off to the side.

9

In a decision certain to sustain him in the long run, he unfixed the lyric.

Having dropped his temporary beard and his appearances in Life, he slipped his traces, waving in the clear sky over a frozen river. Somebody remembered that he smiled and signaled to a pale sun,

a full moon over Oklahoma, a sun- dappled stream in West Gloucester.

10

One boast and out with the truth.

“She wasn’t a Kate. That name, I gave her. She was a Kathleen.”

It was a scholar’s stratagem that, by one cheeky enough to change Shakespeare—

“textual emendation, adopted by one of the ones who matter.”

11

His friend’s death is a Time milestone.

At seventy-four he caps a long illness.

In Hamden, Connecticut, has died the friend also of James Agee (Time employee), collaborator (with Dudley Fitts) in bringing Ajax to heel, and Harvard’s Boylston professor in 1965.

Not bruited in Time, he served (with Sally) to keep O’Connor breathing in life and then death, or that he stood godfather to the poet’s daughter.

Death...