While John Berryman Crosses The Washington Avenue Bridge
6 January 1972
While John Berryman crosses the Washington Avenue Bridge,
he’s reading, midway though Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,
Volume 23, Suffering to Transmigration. He’s straddling everything:
mid-bridge, below the provisional clouds
that are themselves suspended above the planetary body;
above the land and water, onto which falls
a snow that surrounds him, also in mid-whiteness.
And beneath the appalling snow
are hibernating animals and dormant plants
also passing from one state to another.
To all the materials of triumphant, damaged craftsmanship,
Berryman genuflects to his triumphant, damaged craftsman.
It had been when he was coming down Pike’s Peak weeks earlier
that he felt lucky, happier than ever, absorbed among the mysteries,
the perfect green anointing him, provision for the journey.
This should be the last word, before Selah. Bless everybody.
Obligato, Your Majesty. His four-pack-a-day heart
flows its meager reds from one channel to the other,
as the Mississippi wanders just so toward that gulf,
in the middle of everything, yielding itself to the greater waters,
toward that smothering open sea.
The tributary flows toward the parent always,
shaped by what it encounters, modified, patient,
crooked, meandering, lonely, seeking to be absorbed,
pure at heart. How do I love thee, American poetry?
Christ too was in medio, while beauty looked elsewhere
bored by the fall of every unremarkable, trifling sparrow.
Who accounts for the pain of the obedient son?
Pain like that sees you and raises repeatedly,
until you are stripped clean of having to endure,
until you are bare in thy guilt, unadorned,
sparkling and simplified, received.
***
While Anne Sexton Is Driving Away
4 October 1974
While Anne Sexton is driving away,
she rolls down the window to call out to her friend Maxine
something that gets lost in the world’s smooth facade
and the car’s agitation. But it sounds like her:
shivery as her charm bracelet,
with a catch in her voice, and rough like chiffon,
that scratchy fabric slippery and restless
around her high-strung legs and above,
veiling her voyager hungers.
Anne is driving away, calling out something to Maxine.
It might have been that she’d left her Salems
behind her therapist’s vase of daises,
done with the menthol kiss, done
with the ads that promised springtime’s gift,
the couples in nature who were not exiled,
who could smoke and harvest bliss
and didn’t struggle with loneliness.
(To be happy in the harness of an unseen God.
His muscular love. His thighs and hips.)
Anne calls out the car window
to Maxine, words thinning in all that air.
It might have been how the chickadees
she loved to watch outside her kitchen window
would take from her feeder black oil seeds
and hammer the husk for the softer heart,
each brittle coat breaking for need.
Every bird flies out to show its strength,
angling passions in the air’s heat,
casting a pattern in turbulent sweeps to protect
whatever it cherishes in whatever nest it loves:
the little births, the turning points, inconstancy, you name it.
It tries to love in vicissitude. It sings, equally feverish,
to a lover, to a thief, and that song grows spare.
How can history capture the variables, when need
keeps recycling and dredging the hungers,
blurring the camera’s passive stare?
Anne Sexton is driving away,
pulling the wheel in a confident arc,
unyielding, on her way, stunning, willed,
shaping the leveling dark with her bright want still wild.
***
When Robert Lowell Flies Over The Ocean
12 September 1977
When Robert Lowell flies over the ocean to America,
he’s thinking of metaphor, soundings on the brain
like dolphins within the continental shelf,
fluid textures riding restless waves.
He’s thinking of his wives and countless loves
in horizontal wildness, turning their sex lathes.
He’s thinking of his past, of memory and history,
and of painting and verisimilitude:
Vermeer’s play of light, alive across a map;
how birds flew down to peck at Zeuxis’ painted grapes.
Could poetry do as much, with its narrative drawling,
its long-distance relationship between subject and word,
and history’s verbatim of the eye?
In the cab from the airport, he carries on his lap
Lucien Freud’s Girl in Bed. Her elongated blue eyes
abide above her bones, votive in the new world.
At Castine Lowell had been at the edge of invention,
anchored in austere blues
—the water’s depth, the sky’s mid-distance stare—
between heaven and allegory, everything churning in his wake,
the Atlantic collapsing and revising, scraping the shore
like his own blood recycling in his heart.
The car’s pulling over on 67th, all that history
coming to rest now for good.
In the painting the woman’s skin seems radiant,
in confounding grace, while the real sun
glazes the cab with its transient light.
***
Amy Newman’s On This Day In Poetry History is forthcoming from Persea in fall of 2015. Her other books include Dear Editor, fall, Camera Lyrica, and Order, or Disorder. She teaches at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.
