When the Boy Arrives with a Telegram for John Berryman, Berryman Turns to His Student Phil Levine and Asks, “Are You John Berryman?”

Amy Newman

When the boy arrives with a telegram for John Berryman,
Berryman turns to his student Phil Levine and asks,
“Are you John Berryman?”
“No,” says Levine. “Then I must be,” says Berryman,
taking the telegram’s white folded sheets,
the long-distance transmission from elsewhere.
Distance was Berryman’s thing.
His real father, John Smith Sr., had shot himself,
the bullet conveying the gun’s explosive distance to his chest.

In Tampa Bay, when he’d tried to drown,
he’d taken Berryman’s brother Bob out to sea with him,
the two absorbed into the low, far horizon.
Now that’s a good example of distance
right there; that’s a humdinger.
On the beach, women screamed,
but they vibrated into nothings,
into absence, because Bob and his father,
so tiny, just so gone, were too far out, unreceptive,
their eyes were not reading the shore for love.
Later, Smith kills himself outside the apartment,
and mother remarries ten weeks later,
and Berryman gets his new name.

How far we have come from the optical telegraphs,
smoke signals, beacons, and semaphore lines,
where you’d send something into the air and hope
that it was received, because someone
was already looking for you, their eyes scanning
the whole leased acreage of the sky, because nobody
entirely disappears. Are you John Berryman?
His father had taken his brother for a swim.
So it had been Bob and not he whom his father had chosen.
What can be deciphered from the centuries of air and salt,
from maps and old news, from your terror,
from an encyclopedia or the folded page
that someone declares is history?

Amy Newman has published four books of poetry, the latest of which, Dear Editor (Persea Books, 2011), was awarded the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. She is the founding editor of Ancora Imparo, the journal of art, process, and remnant, and a Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University. As she composes this bio note, she is heading down to Austin to check out Anne Sexton’s original oil paintings at the Harry Ransom Center, including Still Life with White Penguin and Deer Figurines.

“When the Boy Arrives with a Telegram for John Berryman, Berryman Turns to His Student Phil Levine and Asks, ‘Are You John Berryman?’ ” appears in our Autumn 2011 issue.