The Heart Is Strange by John Berryman Page A

hasn’t eaten since she came back.
    She went to a wedding, her mother harangued her
    it was all much too much for her
    she sipped wine with a girl-friend, she fled here.
    Many file down for shock & can’t say after
    whether they ate breakfast. Dazed till four.
    One word is: the memory will come back.
    Ah, weeks or months. Maybe.
    Behind the locked door, called ‘back there’,
    the worse victims.
    Apathy or ungovernable fear
    cause them not to watch through the window starlight.
    They can’t have matches, or telephone. They slob food.
    Tantrums, & the suicidal, are put back there.
    Sometimes one is promoted here. We are ecstatic.
    Sometimes one has to go back.
    It’s all girls this time. The elderly, the men,
    of my former stays have given way to girls,
    fourteen to forty, raucous, racing the halls,
    cursing their paramours & angry husbands.
    Nights of witches: I dreamt a headless child.
    Sobbings, a scream, a slam.
    Will day glow again to these tossers, and to me?
    I am staying days.

Eleven Addresses to the Lord
    1
    Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
    inimitable contriver,
    endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,
    thank you for such as it is my gift.
    I have made up a morning prayer to you
    containing with precision everything that most matters.
    ‘According to Thy will’ the thing begins.
    It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.
    You have come to my rescue again & again
    in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.
    You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
    and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.
    Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs:
    how can I ‘love’ you?
    I only as far as gratitude & awe
    confidently & absolutely go.
    I have no idea whether we live again.
    It doesn’t seem likely
    from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view
    but certainly all things are possible to you,
    and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter
                                                                                               & to Paul
    as I believe I sit in this blue chair.
    Only that may have been a special case
    to establish their initiatory faith.
    Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.
    May I stand until death forever at attention
    for any your least instruction or enlightenment.
    I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight &
                                                                                                   beauty.

     
    2
    Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you
    without pretending to know anything about you
    but infinite capacity everywhere & always
    & in particular certain goodness to me.
    Yours is the crumpling, to my sister-in-law terrifying thunder,
    yours the candelabra buds sticky in Spring,
    Christ’s mercy,
    the gloomy wisdom of godless Freud:
    yours the lost souls in ill-attended wards,
    those agonized thro’ the world
    at this instant of time, all evil men,
    Belsen, Omaha Beach,—
    incomprehensible to man your ways.
    May be the Devil after all exists.
    ‘I don’t try to reconcile anything’ said the poet at eighty,
    ‘This is a damned strange world.’
    Man is ruining the pleasant earth & man.
    What at last, my Lord, will you allow?
    Postpone till after my children’s deaths your doom
    if it be thy ineffable, inevitable will.
    I say ‘Thy kingdom come’, it means nothing to me.
    Hast Thou prepared astonishments for man?
    One sudden Coming? Many so believe.
    So not, without knowing anything, do I.

     
    3
    Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me
    against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me
    to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain
    my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting.
    Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
    grant me sleep nightly,