In sleep, of a heart attack, let Henry go.
The end of tennis. The beginning of the dark.
The beginning of the wagon.
It is the onward coming terrifies.
Now at last the effort to make him kill himself
has failed.
Take down the thing then to which he was nailed.
I am a boat was moored on the wrong shelf.
Love has wings & flies.
Amazed it could engineer such agony,
Henry tried the world again & again, falling short of the mark.
Unblock! Let all griefs flow.
There are more over there than over here,
for welcome eerie. The whole city turned out
to welcome Henry home.
He’d made his peace & would no further roam.
He wondered only what it was about.
He felt the news was near.
A couple things stand out right away. The first line is a
begging for release: Let me go. Don’t make me do this myself. The other thing is
the role that love plays. There has been some attention recently about the role
B.’s wife was playing in what appears to a have been a concerted, desperate
attempt to reach out to him and save him, and in spite of the “wars” this
effort sometimes triggered, it forced him to acknowledge the hold that love has
on even someone as lost as he was: “Love has wings & flies.” There is something
subtly disturbing about what follows, because love is the glue that holds so
much of the workings of the world together. “Amazed it could engineer such agony,
/ Henry tried the world again.” It’s love
that’s dragging him back, to more of the agony that is mainly what the world
has ever offered him! What follows after that is a kind of gingerly probing into
what death means and a quiet declaration that he’s ready.
So here was a woman, much younger than her husband,
beautiful and passionate, with a daughter, desperately working to reach her
husband and keep him with them. My thought is that there had to have been such
an awesome emotional intelligence at work in this woman to achieve what she did
and a real dedicated commitment to the moral imperative of advocating for life,
wherever and however. But, I wonder, is there something over-inflated about
making such a sweeping declaration about her commitment, though? Maybe that’s
just what a commitment to a marriage and a moral commitment to life—what should
be expected of us—entails? I don’t know. Whatever its source, there is a
committed engagement with life behind this. Unfortunately, the object of its
attention seems unhelpable. When he’s dragged kicking and screaming into the
orbit of life again, the result for him, he declares, is agony. Well maybe it’s
the pain that heals, the sting of mercurochrome on a cut,that ultimately
protects and allows for healing. Or maybe there is something that Kate
struggled against, not willing to believe, and that eventually bested her: Some
people are lost. They are lost. Or they have been taken. It’s better for
everyone to let them go.
This is Berryman’s position. I’m lost, for Pete’s sake. Let
me out, already. Two things stay his suicidal hand for the moment: The bonds of
love that in this case really are bonds. Possibly something he experiences more
like chains and handcuffs, unfortunately for his wife. The other thing is the
fear: “It is the onward coming terrifies.” Not fear of being dead, but the
human/animal fear of death approaching, deeper than thought and erupting as
feeling, as terror, because it has been engineered by evolution in the organism.
The wide, endlessly frightened eyes of a deer, knowing a cougar waits in every
branch. Deer live in a state of this same fear. It’s their lot and they accept
it because they don’t examine it. For us, an engagement with life’s
possibilities lets us keep the fear behind us. We outrun it easily. If this
engagement with life has been destroyed—through an emotional devastation, from addiction—then
the fear catches up. We probe it compulsively, like the bleeding socket of a
missing tooth. So B. is caught in this terrible place: Yearning for release,
biologically engineered to fear the release’s approach, love dragging him into
the torment of life. Addiction’s existential rack.
I find myself more interested in B's wife than him.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to imagine what she was thinking when she married him.
DeleteI read "love has wings and flies" as literal flies-the kind that pester us because they know we will become the detritus that makes their continued existence possible. And let's not get too romantic about dear wifey. She married a man who-I gather - had achieved fame and means by the time their lives intertwined, and, in this moment, that meant security for a woman who was prevented from having a credit card in her own name. Take a wider view on what she may have been trying to preserve, not in the gold digging sense, but in the self preservation sense. How could she know things would change for women? We try to make the best decisions we can in the time we find ourselves placed.
ReplyDeleteShe plays such a role in this cycle of poems. And yeah, that makes sense--she's trying to preserve whatever station in life she has achieved. That would include her husband's life and sanity. Love could also be involved at the same time, of course. As to why she would have put herself in this position in the first place? It's all conjecture. I've held off reading B.'s biography on purpose, just going to it for illumination of obscure details. Perhaps there is something there about her motivation. But clearly, status and hooking up with fame had to have been in the mix.
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