Dark Lady, mayhap

BRADY SEZ

Near the headwaters of Mississippi

this silver-gray sinkhole

fixed as North Pole

in frozen vortex.  Photography

captures the chill nether-life

of Lethe (Brady sez).

A trestle-bridge passes,

rusty in the distance.  A pocket-knife

of cottonwood unfolds where innocent

Ophelia submerged at last,

last fall.  Her ballast

was a blast of wrath – so violent...

collateral damage of masculine panic?

Mayhap.  Dark Lady

(all Berryman’s study)

of minstrelsy... America’s Titanic

or J. Johnson’s grace (we don’t ship

no coal) exudes black milk

for wild Melchizedek

nested in Erica-barge (molto largo trip).

Jonah-Osiris was a dove, Columbia.

Like a Burchfield winter

or Grant Wood choir

she might emerge, Jesse Ophelia –

she might molt into an Ariadne’s Crown

stars shining down

around your bulbous clown.

Jaybird of Eli, couched over Washington.

2.18.19

by the way, dear Emperor Jonathan, I don't think one should reduce Berryman's "Mr. Bones" interlocutor in the Dream Songs to "music hall schtick". I know some poets & readers take offense at that particular black-talk imitation, but I think the offense is misplaced. Berryman's alter ego is not a subaltern, but a function of his conscience. Clearly, no one should accept the notion that African-American identity is limited to white Americans' imaginary constructs or fantasies about same. But it is mistaken (and uncharitable) to discount those constructs as merely - inevitably - empty, worthless or malign. They can be ironic, critical representations of cultural landscapes & relations, at certain points in history.

This is obviously a "vexed issue", a controversy, within the general heat of cultural politics, and I don't claim to have the final answer.

I think it could be argued that Stubborn Grew takes the representation - the "schtick", if you will - of submerged (oppressed) conscience, and makes it pivotal to the plot. Some intrepid scholar might want to dig into the sources of this - such as (even more than Berryman) Melville's "counter-Bible of the cosmic castaway", Moby-Dick (cf. Olivia Sachs' weird, hard-to-find Melville study, Game of Creation).