Speed

High speed internet has recently come into my life, and with that Youtube. So I post a clip of John Berryman reading Dream Song 29:


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.




The body language in the clip is fascinating, especially Berryman's conducting of the poem with his long index finger. The liquid quality of his body (is he drunk?) and the angles at which he sets his chin.

The ending is justly famous, and now, looking at it again, I see how the whole poem works to point a finger at that secret guilt that some of us (all of us?) are hobbled by. That we have committed an irremediable wrong, and yet we don't know what is is; there is no evidence. And yet, inside, we are wrung. The heart is squashed.

Somewhere Robert Pinsky makes a distinction between guilt and shame, but he doesn't quite articulate the qualities of the difference. Berryman, I suppose, is talking about guilt, as the ending makes clear. But I can't tell which of these I feel. Perhaps both.

I'm back, we'll see

Two nights ago, I went to see the movie "Under the Salish Sea," which consisted entirely of footage of the undersea life of Puget Sound, of the Salish Sea. Among the amazing footage was the hunt of a gray whale by orcas. They exhaust the larger whale by chasing it, they lie on its head to drown it.

Coincidentally, I'd just been made aware of this poem by James Dickey, which is a style of poem that I'd not been exposed to before: the poem as thriller (like the movie "Jaws.") It makes the heart race, and it's impressive how Dickey gets from the southern U.S. to the arctic, via his boy-reading of the explorers.

Pursuit from Under

---

by James Dickey

Often, in these blue meadows,
I hear what passes for the bark of seals

And on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet
Which are trying to walk like a boy's again
So that nothing on earth can have changed
On the ground where I was raised.

The dark grass here is like
The pads of mukluks going on and on

Because I once burned kerosene to read
Myself near the North Pole
In the journal of Arctic explorers
Found, years after death, preserved
In a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten

Before the last entry.
All over my father's land

The seal holes sigh like an organ,
And one entry carries more terror
Than the blank page that signified death
In 1912, on the icecap.
It says that, under the ice,

The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass

To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force

From the iron depths of cold water,
His shadow dwindling

Almost to nothing at all, then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead
To splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man
On a drifting piece of the floe

Which he can overturn.
If you run, he will follow you

Under the frozen pane,
Turning as you do, zigzagging,
And at the most uncertain of your ground
Will shatter through, and lean,
And breathe frankly in your face

An enormous breath smelling of fish.
With the lungs staining your air

You know the unsaid recognition
Of which the explorers died:
They had been given an image
Of how the downed dead pursue us.
They knew, as they starved to death,

That not only in the snow
But in the family field

The small shadow moves,
And under the bare feet in the summer:
That somewhere the turf will heave,
And the outraged breath of the dead,
So long held, will form

Unbreathably around the living.
The cows low oddly here

As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.