In the quiet car on the train to Sydney someone’s talking about money, methadone and diabetes so it takes me twenty minutes to read a single page on John Berryman’s boozing.
When he shat afterhours in the hallway of his university, was it as low as he’d expected or just another notch towards his plunge and miss into the Mississippi?
I’m trying to get beyond the image but the talker’s as distracting as sunlight flashing through the passing trees and landing yellow on the shitting page, and the dazzling ocean to my right, and the koala I look for in the trees, so I keep rereading the passage and it’s more tragic every time.
I haven’t had a drink in two weeks. I’m experimenting while interstate and on my own, and I don’t feel any better or worse, not more or less rested or tired. My desire remains mid-range.
I don’t know what’s become of my exercise plan or the extra litre of water I said I’d drink, and I thought I’d experience random internal self-praise; rather I’m reading more and writing less, forgetting to worry about my children.
What sobriety does is make of me a single tree in a vast forest of other trees the exact same size
and I will tell you simplicity has never been my goal. One thing at a time: write the prize-winning book then return to bark.
I don’t really like John Berryman’s poetry but I’m starstruck by his legend. If he had been a tree, he’d have been the only one at the cocktail party, his evergreen scent stronger than cologne, the mud between the roots of his toes dirtying the carpet.
Wouldn’t guests have clamoured to stand beneath his canopy? Didn’t they? Wouldn’t they have opened windows so his branches wouldn’t have to bend so?
The other day I was walking in the bush – sweating and sober – and I came upon an enormous knot of wooden limbs, a love suite for tangled spooning spores such as ourselves. Not brittle like sticks, but pliant as vines: a draped arm here, a twisted neck there. A puckering of petals rising out of its mud-made rug. It was the most stunning creation as far as destruction goes, and I imagined you with me.
My sculpture of bramble, oh my hovel, my love, I want to pour us a drink, and afterwards we’ll shit in the cleanest of cisterns in the most suburban of homes, and when we’re done we’ll close the door to our stink and say to others at the cocktail party: Yes, we’re fine, just fine, and how about you?
