Star Journal by Christopher Buckley

Author:Christopher Buckley [Buckley, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822982012
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Photograph of John Berryman on the Back of Love & Fame

I have no idea whether we live again.

—John Berryman

I see the man who wrote his 11 intemperate letters

to the Lord is the man half grateful near his end,

a man almost at ease and deep behind his whiskers here.

A charmer who won’t be completely run to ground,

grizzled as the granite going to pieces at his back,

he’s channeling his last cloud-split reasoning

directly at the doubtful sky, uncovering any worth

or last ditch redeeming chance, and carefully

subscribing to that. Who then knows about the soul—

chipped away with age, grey with cosmic grit,

some evanescent paste holding together beyond

our bones? I have some interest in this late line

of questioning, that desperate dodge and grab at

conviction while balancing on one foot, the sinking

weight of everything you likely know on the other.

I have a friend who revered and loved the man, as,

I imagine, God intended us to respect that knot

of light burning in the rare and fervent few among us.

33 years ago, Berryman posed, nonchalant

before the lens in Ireland—Latinate, distilled,

high lonesome and jazzy riffs mixed with reflex

and a syntactic ear for idiosyncrasy, inward

somnambulism—a sober self-estimate that held him

steady amid the wobbling flames, dreaming

in the distracted atmosphere with love and fame

trailing a ways off from where he later waved

then stepped away, dawdling toward the glory

of the dust. For a man who could not much love

himself he came generous with his love and trust

at last in God. O, time wears us away to little

more than salt or sea air—here or elsewhere, but how

to know which metaphysical hammerlock’s going

to pin us down the years and force capitulation?

Yet, he’s still credible, walking the edge, a famous

sparkle of doubt in the eyes, teetering in the blind

up-drafts of belief—both sides of the street in play,

sand beneath the soft soles of his feet. He expects

to fall and will blame, ex post facto and no doubt

rightly, logically so, God, when he is not there,

to swoosh out of the unphysical aether to hold,

metaphorically, his hand, in His infinite one,

that ardent strophe of flesh and blood above

the common traffic of the world, where sooner or

later all our blood and bony minds fall to wreck

one afternoon. One day to the next, I find myself

as reasonably sure as Berryman about the afterlife,

and I would, at 50-something, line up behind him,

my right hand raised into the air in hope of one.

But my heart’s not finally in it; it’s still half bitter

like a root vegetable they always said was good

for you, and so will not likely lift me, heavy out

of this world, as his must have—singing, praising

purely the fog-thick invisible source, the blind-

spot in creation sustained by desperate lines,

and he dead-grateful for his gift, disavowing

eloquence alone. Yet somehow he firmly clutched

in one mildly shaking hand a glass half-full of Faith.

For any proof, I have only, as I said, the friend who

knew him, this photo, his clipped and thorny song—

the conflicted pledges of an absent minded God. . . .

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