#332

[No online link necessary.]

Looks like a voyage, back to New York and the publishers there waiting, with a manuscript so bulky it won’t fit in the big Spanish briefcase. Half is stuffed into another bag. Okay. And now here is a couplet, from this poem, with the first line being possibly the laziest line of poetry John Berryman, poet, ever wrote: “Packing is an India’s women’s / I wonder every time how I manage it.” That’s quite awful, actually, on a number of counts. This thing is making me sleepy. Then onto a ship (he likes ships). I can feel the ship rolling and dipping in slow motion, with a distant somnolent vibration from the engines way down below. There are strangers one meets on board, including on this voyage “the little man from Cambridge with the little beard / padding about alone barefoot with a little book.” “Little” being repeated three times makes the man seem kind of diminutive to me. Obviously he didn’t make a big impression. Then there was the French woman, Yvette Choinais, whom he met right near the end (“swung with”—this was still the 60s) on the penultimate day. Shoot! They could have talked the whole way across the Atlantic, lazing in a pair of sunny deck chairs, chastely chatting about many fascinating things including why she wasn’t married at twenty-seven. That’s about it. The last stanza rhymes, but the others don’t. Honestly? A small, not-unpleasant diary entry. Lax and relaxed, lazy and dozy. Likely should have been culled from that bulky manuscript, but wasn’t. I think this is here only because it’s a poem in which  there is little angst, hardly any regret, no drinking, little about decrepit aging, and no ruminations on death whatsoever. That wouldn’t be remarkable, except, well, you know, it is remarkable. In context, that is. The work is done and the whole dull voyage is suffused in a blithe, listless contentment. Sail on, Henry. The ship probably won’t sink. Just don’t lose that manuscript.