Authors: C. K. Williams
I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself,
and I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions,
which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions,
that for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor.
You breathed more softly now, though; I took heart, touched against you,
and, as though nothing had happened, you opened your eyes, smiled at me,
and murmured — how almost startling to hear you in your real voice — “Sleep, love.”
After Auschwitz
We’d wanted to make France
but by dusk we knew we wouldn’t,
so in a Bavarian town
just off the autobahn,
we found a room, checked in,
and went out to look around.
The place was charming: hushed,
narrow, lamp-lit streets,
half-timbered houses,
a dark-stoned church
and medieval bridges
over a murmuring river.
I didn’t sleep well, though,
and in the morning, early,
I took another stroll
and was surprised to realize
that all of it, houses,
bridges, all except
as far as I could tell
the sleeping church, were deft
replicas of what
they must have been before
the war, before the Allied
bombers flattened them.
At Auschwitz, there was nothing
I hadn’t imagined beforehand.
I’d been through it in my mind
so much, so often, I felt
only unutterably weary.
All that shocked me was
to find the barracks and bleak
paths unoccupied,
and the gas and torture chambers,
and the crematoria;
so many silent spaces,
bereft, like schools in summer.
Now, in a pleasant square,
I came on a morning market;
farmers, tents and trucks,
much produce, flowers,
the people prosperous,
genial, ruddy, chatty,
and it was then there arose
before me again the barbed
wire and the bales of hair,
the laboratories and
the frozen ash. I thought
of Primo Levi, reciting
Dante to the all but dead,
then, I don’t know why,
of the Jewish woman, Masha,
of whom Levi tells
how, when she’d escaped,
been informed on, caught,
and now was to be hanged
before the other prisoners,
someone called out to her,
“Masha, are you all right?”
and she’d answered, answered, answered,
“I’m always all right.”
A village like a stage set,
a day’s drive back
that other place which always
now everywhere on earth
will be the other place
from where one finds oneself.
Not risen from its ruins
but caught in them forever,
it demands of us how
we’ll situate this so
it doesn’t sunder us
between forgivenesses
we have no right to grant,
and a reticence
perhaps malignant, heard
by nothing that exists,
yet which endures, a scar,
a broken cry, within.
The Dress
In those days, those days which exist for me only as the most elusive memory now,
when often the first sound you’d hear in the morning would be a storm of birdsong,
then the soft clop of the hooves of the horse hauling a milk wagon down your block
and the last sound at night as likely as not would be your father pulling up in his car,
having worked late again, always late, and going heavily down to the cellar, to the furnace,
to shake out the ashes and damp the draft before he came upstairs to fall into bed;
in those long-ago days, women, my mother, my friends’ mothers, our neighbors,
all the women I knew, wore, often much of the day, what were called “housedresses,”
cheap, printed, pulpy, seemingly purposefully shapeless light cotton shifts,
that you wore over your nightgown, and, when you had to go to look for a child,
hang wash on the line, or run down to the grocery store on the corner, under a coat,
the twisted hem of the nightgown, always lank and yellowed, dangling beneath.
More than the curlers some of the women seemed constantly to have in their hair,
in preparation for some great event, a ball, one would think, that never came to pass;
more than the way most women’s faces not only were never made up during the day,
but seemed scraped, bleached, and, with their plucked eyebrows, scarily masklike;
more than all that it was those dresses that made women so unknowable and forbidding,
adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access, and boys no conception.
Only later would I see the dresses also as a proclamation: that in your dim kitchen,
your laundry, your bleak concrete yard, what you revealed of yourself was a fabulation;
your real sensual nature, veiled in those sexless vestments, was utterly your dominion.
In those days, one hid much else, as well: grown men didn’t embrace one another,
unless someone had died, and not always then; you shook hands, or, at a ball game,
thumped your friend’s back and exchanged blows meant to be codes for affection;
once out of childhood you’d never again know the shock of your father’s whiskers
on your cheek, not until mores at last had evolved, and you could hug another man,
then hold on for a moment, then even kiss (your father’s bristles white and stiff now).
What release finally, the embrace: though we were wary — it seemed so audacious —
how much unspoken joy there was in that affirmation of equality and communion,
no matter how much misunderstanding and pain had passed between you by then.
We knew so little in those days, as little as now, I suppose, about healing those hurts:
even the women, in their best dresses, with beads and sequins sewn on the bodices,
even in lipstick and mascara, their hair aflow, could only stand wringing their hands,
begging for peace, while father and son, like thugs, like thieves, like Romans,
simmered and hissed and hated, inflicting sorrows that endured, the worst anyway,
through the kiss and embrace, bleeding from brother to brother into the generations.
In those days there was still countryside close to the city, farms, cornfields, cows;
even not far from our building with its blurred brick and long shadowy hallway
you could find tracts with hills and trees you could pretend were mountains and forests.
Or you could go out by yourself even to a half-block-long empty lot, into the bushes:
like a creature of leaves you’d lurk, crouched, crawling, simplified, savage, alone;
already there was wanting to be simpler, wanting when they called you, never to go back.
The Blow
I saw a man strike a beggar,
a rank, filthy, though not,
truly, insufferable beggar.
He had touched the man, though,
from behind, to stop him,
which startled the man,
so he blindly swept out
his fist, not thinking —
but didn’t that make it worse? —
and hit the beggar, harder
than he’d have meant to
if he’d meant to, on the chest.
He knew at once, I saw,
he’d made a mistake;
the beggar, as tipsy
as he was, was insulted,
indignant, but did the man
regret what he’d done
for the sake of the dignity
of the beggar, or for the years
he’d tried to attain
innocence, all for naught
now, or because, really,
he was a little afraid?
The beggar was shouting,
the man wondered whether
to offer him money,
but he guessed the beggar
would lord it over him,
so he looked angry instead.
Walking faster, the beggar
haranguing him still,
the man suddenly saw himself
and the beggar as atoms,
nullities, passing beside
one another, or through.
How we toil, he mused,
from this aimless hour
to that, from one intractable
quandary to the next, until
we’re left only a horrible
fear of our own existence.
Which, he remembered,
a famous thinker thought once,
as the image rose in him
of a youth he’d seen in a madhouse,
“… entirely idiotic, sitting
on a shelf in the wall.”
“That shape am I,”
the sage despaired,
beholding his own mind
flickering desperately over
the great gush of the real,
to no end, no avail.
Bone
An erratic, complicated shape, like a tool for some obsolete task:
the hipbone and half the gnawed shank of a small, unrecognizable animal on the pavement in front of the entrance to the museum;
grimy, black with tire-dust, soot, the blackness from our shoes, our ink, the grit that sifts out of our air.
Still, something devoured all but this much, and if you look more closely,
you can see tiny creatures still gnawing at the shreds of decomposing meat, sucking at the all but putrefying bone.
Decades it must be on their scale that they harvest it, dwell and generate and age and die on it.
Where will they transport the essence of it when they’re done?
How far beneath the asphalt, sewers, subways, mains and conduits is the living earth to which at last they’ll once again descend?
Which intellect will register in its neurons the great fortune of this exceptional adventure? Which poet sing it?
Such sweetness, such savor: luxury, satiety, and no repentance, no regret.
But Maman won’t let you keep it.
“Maman, please…”
“It’s filthy. Drop it.
Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!”
Shock
Furiously a crane
in the scrapyard out of whose grasp
a car it meant to pick up slipped,
lifts and lets fall, lifts and lets fall
the steel ton of its clenched pincers
onto the shuddering carcass
which spurts fragments of anguished glass
until it’s sufficiently crushed
to be hauled up and flung onto
the heap from which one imagines
it’ll move on to the shredding
or melting down that awaits it.
Also somewhere a crow
with less evident emotion
punches its beak through the dead
breast of a dove or albino
sparrow until it arrives at
a coil of gut it can extract,
then undo with a dexterous twist
an oily stretch just the right length
to be devoured, the only
suggestion of violation
the carrion jerked to one side
in involuntary dismay.
Splayed on the soiled pavement
the dove or sparrow; dismembered
in the tangled remnants of itself
the wreck, the crane slamming once more
for good measure into the all
but dematerialized hulk,
then luxuriously swaying
away, as, gorged, glutted, the crow
with savage care unfurls the full,
luminous glitter of its wings,
so we can preen, too, for so much
so well accomplished, so well seen.
The Poet
I always knew him as “Bobby the poet,” though whether he ever was one or not,
someone who lives in words, making a world from their music, might be a question.
In those strange years of hippiedom and “people-power,” saying you were an artist
made you one, but at least Bobby acted the way people think poets are supposed to.
He dressed plainly, but with flair, spoke little, yet listened with genuine attention,
and a kind of preoccupied, tremulous seriousness always seemed to absorb him.
Also he was quite good-looking, and mysterious, never saying where he’d come from,
nor how he lived now: I thought he might be on welfare, but you didn’t ask that.
He’d been around town for a while, had dropped from sight for a few months when
one evening he came up to me in the local bookstore; I could see he hadn’t been well.
He looked thin, had a soiled sling tied on one arm, the beret he usually wore was gone,
and when I turned to him he edged back like a child who’s afraid you might hit him.
He smiled at himself then, but without humor; his eyes were partly closed, from dope,
I guessed, then changed my mind: this seemed less arbitrary, more purposeful.
Still, he had to tilt his head back a little to keep me in focus in his field of vision:
it was disconcerting, I felt he was looking at me from a place far away in himself.
“Where’ve you been, Bobby?” I asked. He didn’t answer at first, but when I asked again,
he whispered, “In the hospital, man; I had a breakdown … they took me away there.”
Then he subsided into his smile, and his silence. “What happened to your arm?”
He dipped his shoulder, his sling opened, and cradled along his arm was a long knife.
“That looks dangerous,” I said; “I need it,” he came back with, and the sling came closed.
I was startled. Did he think someone was out to hurt him? Might he think it was me?
He never stopped looking at me; his agitation was apparent, and not reassuring;
we’d been friendly, but I didn’t know him that well. “Where’s your book?” I asked finally.
He’d always carried an old-fashioned bound accountant’s ledger, its pages scrawled
with columns of poems: his “book,” though as far as I knew no one but he ever read it.
Again no response; I remember the store was well-lit, but my image of him is shadow;
the light seemed extracted from his presence, obliterated by the mass of his anguish.