Skip to main content

John Berryman's Dream Song 131

Image
By
This is one of my favorites from Berryman--I re-read him regularly--and now that NaPo is over (well, I'm giving up, anyway) I'll be back to posting regularly with ephemera and poems. During NaPo I read Berryman and Kim Addonizio and Maurice Manning and Rae Armantrout and Robin Blaser. Blaser's the only one I didn't really get into, but that may be a factor of my dipping into and out of his Collected at random instead of reading through conscientiously as I usually do.




Dream Song 131: Come Touch Me Baby In His Waking Dream by John Berryman


Come touch me baby in his waking dream
disordered Henry murmured. I’ll read you Hegel
and that will hurt your mind
I can’t remember when you were unkind
but I will clear that block, I’ll set you on fire
along with our babies
to save them up the high & ruined stairs,
my growing daughters. I am insane, I think,
they say & act so.
But then they let me out, and I must save them,
High fires will help, at this time, in my affairs.
I am insane, I know
and many of my close friends were half-sane
I see the rorschach for the dead on its way
Prop them up!
Trade me a lesson, pour me down a sink
I swear I’ll love her always, like a drink
Let pass from me this cup
Labels:

Comments

  1. gerry boydApril 29, 2010 at 2:36 PM

    great choice. I also love his Sonnets.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RustyApril 29, 2010 at 2:38 PM

    I really like those too. I was amazed, reading his biography, how quickly they poured out of him and then again how quickly he ignored them for years, these hundred poems or something just sitting around the house. I wonder if anyone today would just let that amount of work just sit around without submitting it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kinnell's Book of Nightmares/Under the Maud Moon

By
Probably everyone knows this poem and this book very well. Kinnell isn't exactly invisible in the poetry world. I loved this poem and this book from the very first time I read it, while I sat on the floor in the old Emerson College at 150 Beacon Street. I've loved kids from a time well before I had any of my own, and I could put myself in this narrator's perspective so easily it was as if I'd suddenly slid from my own life and become a real poet. ;-) I hadn't really read anything that used linebreaks so seemingly haphazard, but powerfully --I got a charge as I read it-- or a voice that seemed so assured of its right to the sentiments expressed. Irony is the rule of the day for many poets, and I don't necessarily cotton to it all the time so Kinnell is a balm for me; I can go back and read BoN and remember how it lit me up the first time and have energy to go back the page with. I'm sort of over his poems now, but the feeling comes back just a little every ti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charles Rammelkamp

By
Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...
1 comment
Read more

Karl Koweski

By
retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.
Post a Comment
Read more