The long book

Book VI:  133 dream songs.  Book VII (tomorrow) has 107.

This one opened with several dream songs addressing the death of Delmore Schwartz, then continued with death in general, as well as with other deaths (Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Yvor Winters ... Hemingway).

And also with several other poems.

I'm posting this one:
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Dream Song 226

By John Berryman

Phantastic thunder shook the welkin, high.
The animals sat face to face & glared.
Henry was afraid.
Her love, which was not exactly that of a maid,
failed to assuage his terrible fears, who fared
forth in such a world.

Arose from throats anguish.  Disappeared in air
many, and many on the ground, and many at sea.
It was not a place to love.
Thumbs into eyes, enormous explosions of
what we know not, until sobriety becomes a vice.
'Our breakdowns guarantee us," said a pal.

I saw her in a dream, from my dream she woke,
pleasantness & courtesy & love
and all them stuff.
She had long hair as if long hair enough
to smother horrors.  What with her in the smoke
he did he will not say.