Benjamin John/Kelly Cherry

Benjamin
John

Kelly
Cherry

Acknowledgments
Epigram quoted from The Greek Anthology, translated by Kenneth Rexroth.
Benjamin John was originally published by
Red Clay Books as part of a larger collection titled
Lovers and Agnostics (Charleen Whisnant Swansea, ed.).

Table of Contents
The Lightfoot Boys
Benjamin John and the Green Queen
O to have been Ben ben Bijn!
The Wind from the North Like a Hootowl Hawking Horse Sense Puts Him Down
At the Greensboro Zoo
A P.O.W. Asian Warlord, Aristocrat, Slips This Poem to PFC B. John
...And Benjamin John Looks to Himself
The Getaway
His First Exploration of the Sea Made at Midnight
The Graduate School of Arts and Science
The Sun
For Alice, Whom He Marries One Year Later: The Proposal
Snowflakes
He and His Wife Entertain Certain of the Faculty
He Teaches in a Girls’ School and Delights in His Pupils
To His Daughter
He Summers in Europe but in Secret Search of the Green Queen: Norfolk Farewell
His Wife’s Birthday
A Threnody for Theorists
To His Nephew Enrolled in a School for Emotionally Disturbed Children
Daylight
To His Wife
The Night After Christmas
O to have been Ben ben Bijn!
The Wind from the North Like an Old Goat Grazing a Trail Bucks Him Aside
Drunk, He Sheds a Tear for the Landscape
His Stoned Younger Colleague in English Speaks
...And Benjamin John Looks to Himself
A Vision
October
The Rose-Lipped Girls
A By-Line: On His Cancer

Faber est quisque fortunae serae.
—Sallust

The Lightfoot Boys
He and his friends took the town;
Together, they painted it red.
Sneaking slugs into Stanley’s jukebox,
Benjamin John said:

“In Ithaca I used to rollerskate
Sometimes at the corner rink,
When I was a kid,” and they slouched
Embarrassed, over their drinks.

At this mention of death.
Then three struck out for Giorgio’s,
and two to Maggie’s meals,
and one, sulky, stuck in Stanley’s booth:
Because things go hard with youth.

Benjamin John
and the Green Queen
He nurses his pint on Washington Square.
Plainly, the cops figure, this is a dare
To be lightly taken.

Like a goggle-eyed rube he has been shaken
Down, down. He was oh so sorely mistaken
In highhanded Eileen,

Who, friend Curt used to say, last night was seen
Twirling with Earl; her eyes outshone the green
she fizgiggly wore,

And she was matchless. A fifth of a pint more
To go: Benjamin John studies the stars
As if to find

Some semblance to the image, in his mind,
Keen, green, and warm. Now, conclude the cops: time
They closed in.

Benjamin John, drunk, shamed, and elated,
Cries to himself that God knows,
The trouble he’s seen nobody knows.
A pox on the Great Bear for its rutilant, lambent, polar light.

O to have been Ben ben Bijn!

The Wind from the North
Like a Hootowl Hawking
Horse Sense Puts Him Down

At the Greensboro Zoo
At dusk, at last
Crawling crabwise across
The sky, the Milky Way
Readies to waylay
Coxcombs and ghosts,
Night owls,

And himself: caught
Cold, he shudders
At his twenty years’ boasts,
At how he niggled, how
like an ass
Stalled and brayed.

Of his mind: rise in spring
To sideswipe like Oriental guerilla

A P.O.W. Asian Warlord, Aristocrat,
Slips this Poem to PFC B. John
1
Skirting this field
Rain from the west
Slapped those low hills
Hemmed in by mist

2
Shoots of wild grain
Spring up again

The sun will shake off
Outworn rag-ends
Of clouds: as a moth
Sheds its golden
Spent chrysalis

...And Benjamin John
Looks to Himself
The draft board said,
“You are wanted
Alive or dead.”

Juggernaut Board
Mother
My friends
My foxy foe:
Let me protest

That I couldn’t care less.
Hell like Heaven
Lies to the West.

The Getaway
East of the sun,
West of the moon,
South from Tennessee,
Benjamin John
lies loafing; but the wide brass bed
Like a plumped-up anecdote
Seems to say,
“You are a dream-ridden fool
Who is no exception nor any rule.”
Benjamin John,
Riding the fevers of 3 a.m.,
Yanks the top sheet over.
To this lackluster, easy, leggy girl
Stretched out in shadow,
He would say,
“Wash the anchovies,/While I pour the wine”
In the words of a crazy Greek,
Cynical, lyrical.
She sleeps in her grand and blockish bed,
Benjamin John.
O this dull indolence.
O this lack of clarity; fuzzy pretense...
Lack of rhythm, drama, sense...
He will pack his toothbrush;
Solo, straddle and spur a llama to Chile or Peru...

Mad as a hatter, like a child
He buries his face in her tangled hair
And wishes this small, wild prayer:
I’m hiding, I’m hiding, and no one knows where.

His First Exploration of the Sea
Made at Midnight
Sportively,
he holds his breath: The bubbles spring
lightly above his head, slicing
the water-sheet...

The firmament
thus is rolled back; above him, cold
is the airy aerie Heaven sent
to taunt him in his discontent:
From Chesapeake Bay upward, he sees
stars, stars, stars.

Algae, fishes,
scaly organisms sway, swat
Benjamin John; he sees he’s not
a lonely monster.
But comfort comes
colder than Job’s, like that: fished for,
and mocked by the far, fair, and lum-
inous lashes of the sleeping sun.
A rocking in his stomach wrenches
wry his soul.

O wretchedly
he shoots for Up: The sandbank saves
his life! or less. His elbows graze
the solid shore...
But Paradise,
the carrot strung before the beast,
dangles still out of reach. He lies,
sick and hungry, on the beach, sighs:
Isn’t he purged? Why does he dream
wantonly
of skin diving among the stars?

The Graduate School
of Arts and Science
Money! my honey
bangs the world around.
Ghosts of Veblen,
ghosts of Marx,
stalk the sun across that yard.

The Sun
On any day with a very blue sky,
the Blue Ridge swells
from his rented book
as a rose
from his rent skull

For Alice, Whom He Marries
One Year Later:
The Proposal
Long distance.
“How are you?” “Fine.
How are you?” “Fine.”
Restlessly, restlessly,
Pines scrape the sky.

Silence. Then together.
“Sorry, you go on.” “No,
You go on.” “Sorry.”
Looking off, he gathers
Night in his eyes.

In the dark room
He moves alone
Restlessly, restlessly.
Asleep he becomes
A drowned bird washed
Ashore, bill, plume
Pared to the bone,
A skeleton.

Snowflakes
Last night the Ides of March
swooped,
not softly, down and settled
on his head; above the mean clack-cackle of wind he heard
wings of birds white,
shrill and unshakeable: chilled to the bone,
he stationed his Florsheims on the furnace grate

and snores past one,
Monday: beyond the windowed bay
stretch
scores of dead Trumpeters, mute, who feather-footed fell
Sunday.
He wakes: Storm’s died down,

serves the damned storm right, and he notes:
his slipsole scortched. O now see him
bluish like a green acolyte, and now
gingerly he undertakes, obsequiously,

shoveling of snow from off the front porch.

He and His Wife
Entertain Certain of the Faculty
They file in, vague or cheery, band
By habit at the makeshift bar
Where ill at ease his wife disbars
(He knows) each from her no man’s land
And nods and chats and shoves caviar
At them, since only the best is good
Enough for those she “cannot stand.”

He backs away from her trumped-up bride:
Here are Thomson, Tucker,
Moomaw, and Steve his usual friend;
And he as well was once a fan
Of the Fabulous Toad, Stealer of Motor Cars.

He Teaches in a Girls’ School
and Delights in His Pupils
No sooner does spring invade
The campus than everywhere
In sleeveless dresses birds
With Beatle pins, long hair,

Long arms, bare legs invite
His interest: He raes
Three pointed passes per day;
How should he hesitate,

Figuring so in their dreams
(Shy, defiant, designed),
To take them, at face value,
Pitching the Keynes he assigned

Aside...Aside he turns,

Sticking with the old high way,

Mouthing the same old text:

He’s got, christ, bills to pay,

And his wife is due next month;
And he has their themes to grade,
Work to do. Work he meant
To do, and plans mislaid...

Half-heartedly, he upbraids
Himself for wishing in vain;
These children, he knows, hang on him
So long as he’s unattained,

And chugging after the train
Of his thought, he thinks he is a wise,
Distant, faithful: Lord, he deserves
A gold star, a prize...prize...

The sun assaults his eyes...

Crossing campus, he squints:
The sun assaults his eyes...

Sun-coppered arms, minted
Days ago, surround him
In the wilderness—pretty girls

Too young, too young, but then,

Someone has to teach them.

To His Daughter

Five years old:

Her dark hair holds

The light of the moon.

She scales his knee:

“If I should grow up,

Would you marry me?”

I will: but hurry,

I’ll be a yellow, mellow, waning melody soon.

He Summers in Europe but
in Secret Search of the Green Queen:
Norfolk Farewell

His wife:	“Write often, lose weight. Your daughter’ll be eight weeks older. Write often. Waves suck the hull of the ship.”
Mr. John:	“Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Mr. John:	“The hull of the ship.”
Mr. John:	“Waves suck the slow warm white sure hull.”
	His book he works on, time to time,
not un-neatly packed, his three by five note cards
	stacked,
he pushed off, off, off, off, off, charily heaving off
	from Norfolk’s nestling June: there
***
	his old desire dizzy with the smell of dust and honey- suckle mingling day- dream and revenge drained his mind of memory NT> stuffed it up with tissue stars lugged long ago from N.Y.C....fool, a fool, he groans, fool indomitably!
***
Benjamin John: One tried and trying soul the wide north wind wrapped up —and shipped to sea— ***
In his head her silk voice like a lead gong clangs, “Often.”

His Wife’s Birthday
She sups with him and bravely smiles;
And smiling back, he is perplexed
By age, an dby her tendered sex,
By her loose dry skin, her juvenile
Bangs; that her hair is dyed to a Greek
Shade, her eyes are shadowed. How vexed
He is at the unsuccess of her wiles

Which yearly mocks him; her female fears
Paraphrastic, harped on,
Score his nerves like a scratched record
Until in self-defense he is bored,
Bored to tears.

A Threnody for Theorists
The leaves want raking; four o’clock settles
A reddish glaze on the front-yard pinecones.

Benjamin John, slumped in his chair, scanning
The headlines, works slowly on his whiskey sour.

And frowns at statesmen and their paramours
And sniggers at the rumors over Hanoi

Skeptically,
Unruffled,

As day by day the fallout climbs; and China,
Spinning her silk, screens off the first-born sun.

To His Nephew
Enrolled in a School for Emotionally
Disturbed Children
Retface in the lamplight rocks,
Rocks...rooted in his own shadow.
Balder than a mushroom, longfaced

And sloopshouldered, small, small,
Crafty...but blocked by the risisng
Red sky: Ratface founders at sea,

See Ratface. This is Ratface. Run,
Ratface, run...The very devil
Damns your dreams of lost Atlantis,

And before long, my hair will go
This strange man things; and if he could,
He would link into ladders your rubber sheets,
Flee with you to France, and by your side, frame
and fight the Napoleonic Wars.

Daylight
lolls upon his desk.
Sticky in steaming curls,

washed out, the thick, thin girl
who shuffles to his side

unleashes, in her eyes,
in how she ducks, shunts, shies,

the hell she sics on him.
(Christ. Nightly clutched,

in wordless dreams, she is made
Athena, fierce Lady of Freshman Themes.)

He listens to her tears,
and the slass bell buzzes.

He sees, looking beyond her cursed whining eyes,
sun grazing on the dying grass.

To His Wife
His wife is dead.
He is divorced
From what she said,
From what she read:
Trollope, Roth,
Ruth, Bless Ovid.
He feels no pity,
Neither remorse;
But why has he got
This ache in his head?

The Night After Christmas
Clearing a space on the windshield,
He angles down this winding street
Toward Park, and curses the fool speed
Limit that hounds him in to heel.
He can hardly see in the middle ground
Those mangy azaleas, whipped by the sleet;
Or make out where the clouds have wheeled.

At the end of the road, does he wonder
Resentfully, bitching
That he knocks too late, the given-up guest,
Why air, rain, fire, fate and the snowbound earth
Should forever steal his thunder?

O to have been Ben ben Bijn!

The Wind from the North
Like an Old Goat Grazing
A Trail Bucks Him Aside

Drunk, He Sheds
a Tear for the Landscape
Here lies no one,
only the drab
delta, lowering
and sullen and dumb,
by down-
pours, over-
flows,
beat and stopped;
and near the river’s mouth,
lies rudderless, lies unmanned,
a drabber craft—not
moored, not
salvaged, only—
lonely—
beached.
Beached.

“Let the earth/Which has borne us all,
bear you.”

His Stoned Younger Colleague
in English
Speaks
When I review myself, I wink.
Steve Link is a ballsy fink.

How sad I am on Sunday.
I tend to drink.

I tend to drink.
In Camp I coo
To my wife.

“You’ve got that, what we ain’t got any,
You’re my Little Orphan Annie.”

I scan her dogeared eyes, Ben.
So then she strips.

Weekly.

Come Monday,
I needs wise rise
To torture the truth of Kafka’s lies.

...And Benjamin John
Looks to Himself
The figgly wars
that gobbled me
have passed away
from gluttony
and a weak heart.
I’m tart.

A Vision
Light spread on shade,
riding the wide wind down.
The Greek green queen streams
Suddenly like a falling star.
She sighs like a tired avatar.

In her fire-eating face, signs
Of use: what waxy vein! sunken
Cheek: his darling bright chick

Who from peck-pecking at her mirror
Fell prey for her own shrunk shrine.
The white line of her neck droops,

And still, slyly, unseen,
He flicks her a kind kiss.
Besides, she owes him that
For what she made him miss.

But wasn’t pain sweet?

But doesn’t she tax his patience now they meet?

The lady ever wore her hair upswept
Coiled to spring
Like a green snale
Rattling among rocks.

What good does it do us to mourn
For our sons when the immortal
Gods are powerless to save
Their own children from death?

—Antopatros

October
GENTLE and without warning
ELEGANT
—like a small girl sidney in velvet beret—
fitfully,
light rain at evening sprays
his storm window: his studio window.
His son-in-law, gray-haired, lantern-jawed.
thin, hands him his glass: grave, GRAVE
boy of fifty years;
chee. Did sons in law like this one FERRET
for—god knows, god knows what they hunt for
in a dead wife’s father. He objects (bearing
the glass and his to his ONE-man’s bar),
he has his own teaser: but what screwed son-
in-law could see, no man is a man
until he like bow-legged Sarasite can bandy
an OLD tune about/in double time.
(He shrugs) And (He shrugs) he has no words.
He was born knowing none
and has SHUFFLED into his last years
knowing none
and cares less. How then should he content
a shook son-in-law who never trembled
nor giggled
when Markos, as was right,
as was FINE,
rightly concluded:

“So pour the whiskey and kiss my wife or yours.”

Or did both women, hand-in-hand
Sometime ago, fanning out their long dark hair,
Rise wheeling through the night air,
And turn south, and disappear...

Breaking out his better Scotch,

He scans himself in the mirror,
Mirror, on the wall;
He is not, now, surprised
By love or death or by the startling, silky
Rain or the Fall

And anyway (cheering

His own face and its workable disguise),
His turn, his turn will come; and dead,
Even this fool will have time to grow wise.
He draws the brown study drapes

Against the rain...

He draws the brown drapes

...rain, what remarkable...(sighs)
What rain...
What rain...

“What, Tom? I guess I was thinking

About something.

Yes.

Yes. No, no; nothing.

It wasn’t anything.”

The Rose-Lipt Girls
Each day the past seems longer ago:
Facts, faces, figures, fade
And perhaps he is not unafraid
At night, that they were never so:
Or where could all those flowers go?
...The wind in the willows, brushing
The moon, spanking the wild roses,
Foreshadows their full eclipse.

But for every Beauty he’s forgotten,
There were two he kissed.

A By-Line: On His Cancer
Wife and mother, father, daughter,
Each in death dispraises me.

At sunup, I start on scrambled eggs
And Old Crow: the bright sun brazes me
into the model of an old man
At breakfast: but nothing dismays me,
Not truth nor art. Only that I own
Time still, and solitude, amazes me.

The trellis roses, damp, bud. I see
The milkman making rounds. Dear stern friends,
—It’s nothing new, being without them—
In my turn, I’ve grown a secret fondness for
—Later on I’ll prune the sycamore—
This oddest of my maladies that stays with me.

The first collection of poems by a remarkably promising and exciting young writer.Benjamin John is one of the rarest achievements in recent American poetry. It achieves magnificent flights of intense characterization. It is the work of a highly accomplished poetic technician who is also at home with fiction; it has the novelist’s breadth and depth of empathy. Many books are greeted with excessive praise, as if only shouting could be heard above the rumbling of the inexhaustable presses; but when the shouting dies down, it is safe to predict that book’s voice will still be audible.

—HENRY TAYLOR
(writing in Masterplots Annual )

A Wilshire Book