“Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood”
Footing our cabin’s lawn, before the wood,
awry & uncontaining yet see walls
deep-fissured of concrete
that held their pleasure. Nowadays if you could
bathe, in the far end, you’d be grassy & beat.
Hollyhock falls
& goldenrod to seed. Summer’s fair done
upon this mountain. Give or take a few
New England hundred miles,
this must be Gatsby’s terrible pool, the one
where the Twenties drained out and what we could do—
undefiled, ah nor defiles—
we stood to wonder. The rough bottom’s burst
with frantic plants. On Smith Point, right at the end,
around an older pool
hung over the roaring sea, except in its worst
summers, my friend’s grandmother paddled but sunned
in circuit not, her hat horizontal.
Excerpted from ONLY SING by John Berryman. Edited and with an Introduction by Shane McCrae. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Martha Mayou and Sara Lissick. All rights reserved.
“Sometimes, one can tell fairly easily why a poet decided not to collect a particular poem in a book. But for the life of me I don’t know why Berryman chose not to collect ‘Footing our cabin’s lawn.’ Here is a poem of seeing and memory, and with no ‘I’ in it (there is a ‘my,’ sure); musical, lyrical, graceful, and quiet. Digging through his uncollected ‘Dream Songs,’ I found a number of treasures, more than I would have expected. This is one. The music in the break between the first and second stanzas! And in the last line, that chiming of the ‘o’ in ‘not’ with the second ‘o’ in ‘horizontal,’ delayed and complemented by the alliteration, each word between them starting with the same ‘h,’ but followed by a different vowel, the third of which is a different ‘o’! A great poet is great even in small things.”
—Shane McCrae
John Berryman
John Berryman won widespread recognition and acclaim for his innovative, Pulitzer Prize-winning book 77 Dream Songs, a collection of sonnet-like poems whose wrenched syntax, scrambled diction, extraordinary leaps of language and tone, and wild mixture of high lyricism and low comedy plumbed the reaches of a human soul and psyche.