#32

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/poem-10709.html

A lament over the ordinariness, the status quo the poet’s life had taken on.

Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, wrestled with the demon ennui. Lurking about outside his flat in Paris late one night, on the Île Saint-Louis, I went searching for Monsieur Ennui and I found him. I felt it, Baudelaire’s sin thick like a yellow fog over the classic buildings and the dense, silent black river. The boring virulence, the arrogance of this mode of suffering, the haughty disdain for the gifts that Earth and History have bestowed, ennui glinting off the Seine in points of light transmuted from sparkling gold to loci of concentrated jaundice. You can find this sort of thing in a European city if you care to. Yes, I got the problem—Charles—in Paris, France on a dismal lump of an evening in the loveliest city on Earth. Screw it. Ennui is a devil who will transmute anydish to a gray porridge if given space to work his corruption through. I walked away from it then, but I learned, and I told Baudelaire and his pet demon that while I may deign to learn from this evening, you do not get my heart. I’m not feeling it today either, and in fact, for all my shortcomings and sins, boredom and the dread of ordinary rarely work their way with me. At the moment I’m warm, content and tranquilly uninspired on a cold and rainy Sunday morning with strong hot coffee and toast from good bread with a bright citrus marmalade I made a few week ago. Not jiving at all with the ennui, thank you very much. Here is a poem about desire for the ordinary in a dangerous world.

White-tails

Two bucks yesterday down the yard

Antlers like candelabras with flames
Shining off the polished ivory points.
Down there must feel a safe corner for a deer.
In spring, the fawns cavort
Under the care-alert eyes of their mothers
Imprints left hollow in the thick grass
Where the does rested under the apple tree.
Feral cats are curiosities
And no dog in this neighborhood
Has the gumption to bother
A fully antlered buck in his prime
Because hounds and spaniels, you know,
May bark, but only as confession
Of the fear that keeps them in their
Timid place, wolf ancestors subdued
Over the long eons
By a spot on a rug by a fire. Dogs
Know the bargain they struck
Better than we do.
I like deer in the yard
And if they eat the hostas
Now and then, it’s part of our bargain.
Yes, eat some flowers at night
And in return, you must grace our lawn
With your savage presence, coats dark,
Dripping with the cold rain
Ears swiveling like radar dishes
For the grass-switch or twig-snap
Of a haunting panther
That sets bucks always bounding
In flight from my ordinary yard
For the woods, white tails panicking
Though I promise you
Here, you need not believe in panthers.
But no buck ever believes me.
 
KZ