#12 Sabbath

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-12-sabbath-annotated

About the pressure of religion on the poet, with a creepy, haunted, midnight tone throughout. The first stanza, skulking about, being followed. “Tes yeux bizarres me suivent”—your strange eyes follow me. There is the isolation and fear that comes from being an outsider. Watched. The second stanza, the famous poets, Coleridge Rilke Poe, absurdly shouting unheard commands down the centuries. Instead, “toddlers are taking over.” The direction of adults, passed along through their literature, falls on unprepared ears. In the third stanza, “snoods converge”—snoods are hair coverings in general, and are associated with married Jewish women as well, and there is the movement through the graveyard by the “kirk”, a Scottish word for church, so Christian and Jew are invoked equally and exert similar pressures on the “weary-daring” man. I suspect most sensitive, artistic poet-types understand “weary-daring”—it takes verve and energy to resist the weight of the dominant culture’s crush, but that energy comes in waves, in moments of inspiration or fury. In between, there are more moments of exhaustion to endure. Resist the religious press and you risk a branding as witch. But, just watch. (I really like this one.)

Word of the World

Why venture
Out at night?
Voles creep through a dry lot and gather
Stacking coarse grasses
Near the throats of their burrows
An oily rat arranges soggy turns
Of cardboard and plastic bags
Just so, just so—there now, there now
Just so, so
In a corrupt alley
The brown shards of beer
Bottles, and the razor bright pull-tabs
Never cut his fastidious feet
Glinting under rich sodium pink
And arabesques of scarlet neon
Glare and broken
Sparkles offer shifting
Cover from the piercing
Murder of felines and owls
Whose standard bright eyes
Shine with the radiation
Of incandescent power
Quiet, alone, careful
Alley dwellers push and pile
Verses of dried grass
Rats stack trash stanzas
The garbage men rumble by
Their brooms and their trucks
The diesel fumes that settle on lots
That send mindless electric roaches
Scuttling to their cracks
Voles gather weeds
That grew and grew
And died and died
And rubbish blows
Like leaves fallen
From the tall city’s forest
Into abandoned corners
Where word of the world builds.

KZ