#383

http://jcpoetryclub.livejournal.com/5904.html

A morning poem, fittingly offering a sunrise rebirth after the funeral dance of DS 382. The rebirth comes, perhaps ironically, “at the end of the labour.” The labor, obviously, is the writing of the great Dream Songs project, though the pun on labor as childbirth is there, has been there, all along. There is a sense of relief dawning. The labor is over, something new—even if it’s death coming—is on the approach. I feel like I have earned a degree of sympathy for this sentiment. A year of commentary and response isn’t fifteen years of suffering and intensely ambitious writing, but I will declare that this was an intense and focused year of effort. The Temple to Poseidon at Sounion still stands, in ruins, and it’s a perfectly appropriate symbol. Poseidon gave Odysseus hell, and the Greeks built him a temple, which time and weather have given hell right back to. In its bare, battered, ascetic endurance, the temple is a symbol for any artist’s achievement. There was much suffering, and time has taken its toll, and will continue to erode and batter the achievement. But there it stands. Wow.

That woman he mentions, the tall Anglaise? “She was not born for sacrifice, I think. / But she was born.” In other words, someone so beautiful and so “fine”, by being born, time and life will batter her too, and eventually sacrifice her too. It’s what we get by being born, the price we pay. But something can endure, at least for a time, and that’s always amazing when it does. Chipped and weathered marble columns, precariously, mysteriously balanced on their foundation on a cliff over the Aegean.

B. states here that he didn’t dream the night before the morning when this poem was written. That wasn’t usual for him. “Many sins / are purged by a dreamless night.” The weight of the poem is lifting from him. Well, funny enough, for the very first and only time since this project of mine started over a year ago, I dreamed about it this morning. It wasn’t a beautiful or pleasant dream, but the details don’t matter and aren’t something I care to share anyway. The details were simply a dream-riff off of tragedies we’ve all heard in the news over the past year. But I learned this. It sounds silly to articulate, but it matters to one who has for the last year engaged (from a more or less safe distance) with the depression, addiction and suicidal yearnings of one writer so intensely: I am not that. In the dream, it was time to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. But I couldn’t, and more to the point, wouldn’t do it. The humiliation and pain that I knew, knew, knew were rapidly approaching still weren’t enough to convince me to do that. The only lesson from this that matters: My personal attachment to life is utterly unshakable. There will be no arguing me out of that, ever. Period. Not even the argument of an advancing SWAT team. (As B. asserts [twice!], "All men have made mistakes.") I also understood at the same time that someone who, for whatever reason, hasn’t been afforded a seat on top of life’s secure foundation can’t be easily coaxed back onto it for the same unarguable reason. It’s not even a consideration. This person will eventually find a way to destroy himself. This doesn’t mean he won’t struggle, try. In waking from this dream this morning as the sun was rising, and mulling over its significance, I realized something else. I have made one sustained interpretive mistake, although I followed the poet into it, so I hope I can be forgiven. The distinction between life on one hand and literary ambition on the other is a false dichotomy. The one dichotomy that overrides all others, and the only one that matters, is the one between life and death, and poetry is always on the side of life. Always. We write to live; to write is to celebrate life. Berryman did it too. He might not have even realized it. Knocked off of life’s unshakeable pedestal, he struggled to write his way back onto it, dragging his sins, pain, and insecurities with him. For most, the foundation of life is solid and holds you like your feet are iron and it’s a great rare-earth magnet. For others, it’s slick and there is a constant earthquake. He made it there for just a bit, and his wild unsteady gyrations and desperate flailings from a distance looked like dancing.

#382

http://winspoetry.blogspot.com/2011/01/from-dream-songs-by-john-berryman.html

               Instructions for My Funeral


At my funeral, the coffin will be of plain, planed walnut, and it will be dropped carelessly into a shallow hole in the dirt beneath a spreading tree. Tulip, white oak, catalpa, sycamore—these will be acceptable species. Apple. Tupelo. Cedar. Cherry. Let the horses graze over the spot, where the grass will grow richly green, well-manured from below. Let there be feasting in the field—cornmeal mush with syrup boiled from the woods nearby, blackberries that guests may gather themselves, each scratch across the backs of their hands a caress of memory. Cups of pawpaw flesh with pudding spoons. Bourbon, fresh maple sap, and complex red wine to drink. Each guest may fry a fish, which they may hook and gut themselves. There will be worms aplenty. Fires for roasting will be scattered about, and there will be an iron kettle simmering with river water for tea that smells of limestone, frogs and thin blue smoke.

Set up the tables in the old barn, gray-weathered planks balanced on hay bales and spare tractor wheels. The plates and glasses, the utensils and napkins, will not match. Blue dishes and white, one with a flower off-center and one with a red bird, this one bordered in gold, that one dark green with a crack. Clear pink glass. Gray-blue plastic. Shadow purple crockery. Thunk and ring them, and never let speeches call the throng to order. There will be no public prayers, though offerings of private thanks may be permissible. Guests may relieve themselves over there among the trees.

No one will wear black. Green, blue, and brown will be appropriate. Any flowers in the men’s hair, or tucked in the folds of women’s skirts, or between their toes in their sandals, will be wild, shy or flamboyant as the bearer prefers. Rue anemone, trillium, butter-and-eggs, clover, dandelion, coneflower, poison ivy, and long strands of green algae will all be appropriate. When darkness falls, there will be candles and kerosene lamps, foxfire and the waxing moon for light. Music will arise spontaneously as guitarists, flautists and percussionists are moved. Dancing will follow as dancers are moved. There will be readings of cummings, a paean to Wordsworth, guests will come to understand that beauty is truth, truth beauty, that someone kindly stopped for me, that that has made all the difference. Guests will experience a tighter breathing and zero at the bone. Guests may sleep together in the loft in the straw.

In the morning, there will be a cacophony of chirruping, and swallowtails will rise from the weeds and float toward ironweed. Guests will ride back to their lives and will be asked to forget that the deceased ceased. Let the him that was me beat in their hearts and let their hearts beat the stronger for having heard of him. May they ever feed like pigs in his honor. May they remember him in their sleep.


KZ

#381

https://books.google.com/books?id=HP-DBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA403&lpg=PA403&dq=Cave+man+Henry+grumbled+to+his+spouse+It's+cold+in+here+I'd+rather+have+a+house&source=bl&ots=fmFUblM-4u&sig=J3bguF4DME59WHbpstmmi9Xj1E0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigr6i8467KAhXJ4SYKHQYuDBsQ6AEIHzAB#v=onepage&q=Cave%20man%20Henry%20grumbled%20to%20his%20spouse%20It's%20cold%20in%20here%20I'd%20rather%20have%20a%20house&f=false

My response to DS 131, a poem I titled “A Leak in the Ocean,” is probably the best response I can think of to this odd but interesting DS 381. If this blog project ever becomes an actual book, I’ll probably rewrite a response to 131 and put the poem here where it fits so much better. That poem didn’t actually have much at all to do with 131, but it’s a perfect fit here. B. writes,

            I am frightened by the waves upon the shore

            & seldom steal there, wetter

            with the wild rain, but safe & back to the cave.

I think my poem is an apt response to that: Get out of your cave or your cottage and get your ass wet out in the wild rain. That’s where the crazed buffeting of life is found—just, don’t do anything stupid. And of course, it’s all a metaphor: There are lots of ways to curl up in a ball. Don’t…

B.’s attitudes toward nature have slowly developed over the course of the Dream Song cycle, and we see them being reaffirmed here. When it comes to nature with B., when it figures at all, there is always that sense of fear, resentment, anxiety toward it.  The waves upon the shore are a big loose metaphor for life and nature itself, and yes, Henry is frightened by that, nature’s importance having come back to him through his body’s disintegration. The most positive aspects of his existence were lived through socialization, academics, literature, ambition, but it seems to have all been a performance, and it always strikes me as hollow for all its moments of brilliance and its manic energy. The undoubted moments of tenderness toward his young daughter in the end weren’t enough to draw him away from all that, toward life, and his wife couldn’t draw him toward it either. His contact with life and nature was through his body, through sex and alcoholic addiction, and the resultant psychological and physical suffering. Pain will get you natural in no time, but of course it’s the dark and terrifying underside of the natural. No wonder he was frightened by the metaphoric seashore.

Most of this poem, especially the untraceable (for now, anyway) references of the second stanza, is likely built of images from some dream, splashes of foam from out of the churning noosphere that got painted here and fixed forever, like the utterly once-only-forever figure of a wave crashing against a rock. Never again, but there it is: Look! Winslow Homer was such a master at catching and fixing these moments. Homer wasn’t afraid of the waves upon the shore.


Here is the revision:

Gale

Sometimes it’s enough to just be there

For a moment. A gale from the south
Pushes stinging waves of sand.
Raindrops crack against my hood
Like June bugs on a windshield.
Still, this empty beach beckons.
No sensible human dares
Venture out on a day like this:
Leave the shore to hunkering gulls,
Willets and sandpipers probing the packed
Sand. But so often the correct
Decision is to turn from a warm
Cottage, calm and strawberries waiting,
And let a fierce Atlantic gale
Have you. Boiling and roaring swings
The ceaseless surf, its sticky molecules
Of life coalescing forms of foam
The wind scatters. A bluefish jumps,
Then others, a school of silver nightmare
The croakers and spots, weakfish and drums
Shrink from in whatever dreams
Their maker has descend on the roiling
Bubbles and currents of sleep offered
Such gentle fishes in the surf.
I stand buffeted, alone,
With wind and leaping fish, violent
Water, the wind-savaged gulls,
Watching the bluefish who jump then blow
Away, amazed, maybe, that the thin
Windy storm is more potent
Today than the compressed mad
Maelstrom from which they spring.
Rain soaks the atmosphere, and I know
Why the blues are jumping: Their limits
Have broken down. Churning sky
And storming crashes of gray water
Confuse the elemental difference
Till the ocean opens in froth
And the air is driven with the storm’s
Wild water. If jumpy fish
Can fly today, then I might breath
Their porous element, head
Beneath the waves to catch the croakers,
One last terror to consider
Before they sink amongst the broken
Shells. But blues’ teeth are sharp.
I’ll keep to the streaming sand, safe
From voracious bluefish gnashing the surf.