Poet's Choice

& wake to a hot breakfast.

Off the coast was an island, P'tit Manaan,

the bluff from Richard's lawn was almost sheer.

A chill at four o'clock.

It only takes a few minutes to make a man.

A concentration upon now & here.

Suddenly, unlike Bach,

& horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me

that one night, instead of warm pajamas,

I'd take off all my clothes

& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff

into the terrible water & walk forever

under it out toward the island.

(All quotations are from John Berryman, "Selected Poems," edited by Kevin Young. The Library of America. Copyright © 2004. The stanza from "Defensio in Extremis" and the poem "Henry's Understanding" first appeared in John Berryman, "Delusions, etc." Farrar Straus Giroux. Copyright © 1969, 1971 by John Berryman; copyright © 1972 by the Estate of John Berryman, renewed 2000 by Kate Berryman.)