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Missing | Mar 01 2002

My favorite poem is #29 from John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. This is the poem I would bring to the desert island of one poem, the poem I would remember in a world in which all but one poem must be forgotten.

I don’t expect you to like it so much. Poems are personal. And for me this poem is associated with a certain time in my life and with an odd incident I’ve never been able to resolve. Before I get into that, though, here’s the poem.

29

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

*

I was in a laundromat in the west 50’s, in what was then called Hell’s Kitchen but which has since been re-packaged as Clinton. I was nineteen. A young woman, a Krishna, struck up a conversation by the dryers. I have only the vaguest recollection of her: dark hair, dark skin, shortish. She came on to me, there’s no other way to explain it. Her method was compelling: she spoke as if everything had already been settled and it was a simply a matter of working out the details of where and when. I asked for clarification of the rules about pre-marital sex for Krishnas. She said it was strictly forbidden, a big no-no, but the way she said this it was as though she were speaking from some point in the future, after we’d slept together, and saying something like, “Oh, I’ve been such a bad girl.”

The weird thing is, I don’t remember if I slept with her or not. I don’t think I did—that is, if I did, I assume I would remember, but it also seems possible that I’ve forgotten.

Another possibility is that I dreamt this.

A third possibility is that I killed her.

I realize that’s a disturbing thought, but sometimes when I think about her, I see this cabin in my mind, a cabin in the woods, and I think that if I did kill her, I probably killed her in this cabin.

Whenever this thought comes to me, I start at the beginning and try to remember what happened after the scene at the dryers. Did we go back to my apartment? To hers? Did one of us suggest a trip to the woods?

I look and look and there’s nothing there.

In more reasoned moments, I compare this to crossing a bridge and wanting to jump. One doesn’t really want to jump; it’s just a morbid fascination with what one could possibly do, in the extreme. In the case of the Krishna woman, the fascination is not with what I could possibly do now, but with what I could have possibly done in the past, again in the extreme.

On the other hand, it’s not a reach to think I slept with her. I’ve been known to do that now and then.

More likely, though, I made her up. That I do all the time.