The Heart Is Strange by Berryman John

Author:Berryman, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713591
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Cage

(1950)

The Cage

And the Americans put Pound in a cage

In the Italian summer coverless

On a hillside up from Pisa in his age

Roofless the old man with a blanket yes

On the ground. Shih in his pocket luck jammed there

When the partigiani with a tommy-gun

Broke in the villa door. Great authors fare

Well; for they fed him, the Americans

And after four weeks were afraid he’d die

So the Americans took him out of the cage

And tented him like others. He lay wry

To make the Pisan cantos with his courage

Sorrow and memory in a slowing drive

(And after five months they told Dorothy

Where Ezra was, and what,—i.e., alive)

Until from fingers such something twitcht free

… O years go bare, a madman lingered through

The hall-end where we talked and felt my book

Till he was waved away; Pound tapped his shoe

And pointed and digressed with an impatient look

‘Bankers’ and ‘Yids’ and ‘a conspiracy’

And of himself no word, the second worst,

And ‘Who is seeryus now?’ and then ‘J. C.

Thought he’d got something, yes, but Ari was first’

His body bettered. And the empty cage

Sings in the wringing winds where winds blow

Backward and forward one door in its age

And the great cage suffers nothing whatever no

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