Authors: C. K. Williams
Poets try to help one another when we can: however competitive we are, and we are,
the life’s so chancy, we feel so beleaguered, we need all the good will we can get.
Whether you’re up from a slum or down from a carriage, how be sure you’re a poet?
How know if your work has enduring worth, or any? Self-doubt is almost our definition.
Now, waiting with Bobby, I could tell he’d had enough of all that, he wanted out;
that may have explained his breakdown, but what was it he expected from me?
I was hardly the most visible poet around; I’d published little, didn’t give readings,
or teach, although, come to think of it, maybe that’s just what Bobby was after.
Someone once said that to make a poem, you first have to invent the poet to make it:
Bobby’d have known I’d understand how the first-person he’d devised had betrayed him.
Bobby from nowhere, Bobby know-nothing, probably talentless Bobby: wasn’t that me?
I’d know as well as he did how absurd it could be to take your trivial self as the case.
But if Bobby’d renounced poetry, what was my part to be? To acknowledge it for him?
Flatter him? Tell him to keep on? I might well have, but not without knowing his work.
Then it came to me that his being here meant more than all that — it was a challenge;
Bobby wanted to defy me, and whatever he’d taken into his mind I represented.
The truth is I was flattered myself, that it was me he’d chosen, but there was that knife;
though the blade was thin, serrated, to cut bread, not tendon or bone, it still was a knife,
it could hurt you: despite myself, I felt my eyes fall to its sorry scabbard, and as I did,
I could see Bobby’d caught my concern: he seemed to come to attention, to harden.
Though he still hadn’t threatened me quite — he never did — I knew now I was afraid,
and Bobby did, too: I could sense his exaltation at having so invaded my emotions;
an energy all at once emanated from him, a quaver, of satisfaction, or anticipation:
“This is my poem,” he might have been saying, “are you sure yours are worth more?”
Then the moment had passed; it was as though Bobby had flinched, though he hadn’t,
torn his gaze from mine, though it clung, but we both knew now nothing would happen,
we both realized Bobby’s menace was a mask, that it couldn’t conceal his delicacy,
the gentle sensitivity that would have been so useful if he’d been able to keep writing.
He must have felt me thinking that, too; something in him shut down, and I wondered:
would he take this as a defeat? Whose, though? And what would a victory have been?
He turned then and without a word left, leaving me stranded there with my books
while he drifted out into the rest of his life, weighed down with his evasions, and mine.
I never found out what he came to in the end; I’ve always kept him as “Bobby the poet.”
I only hope he didn’t suffer more rue, that the Muse kept watch on her innocent stray.
Stone
These things that came into my mind,
that were unbearable, unthinkable.
Certain visions I suppose they could be called,
abominations that afflicted me with agony.
To think of them even now requires awful effort.
Like the hero going into battle
needing four strong men to lift his eyelids.
The unforgiving eyelids of my memory.
Like Perseus, the Gorgon in his mirror-shield,
how he could strike and not be turned to stone.
The stone slabs in my mind. All they hide.
All I’ve tried so to forget which stays in me.
Even, once, a head; it only matters whose to me.
A head hacked off, set bleeding on a table.
I had thought that only warriors, only Perseus,
could do these things. And yet it glared at me.
Though I knew it was my mind that had done
this thing, mind reeled away in agony.
The agonizing plasma consciousness can be.
Stone. Slabs of stone. Eyelids. Memory.
Droplets
Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,
but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,
all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can’t help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,
but rather as a layering of instants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again.
Tender
A tall-masted white sailboat works laboriously across a wave-tossed bay;
when it tilts in the swell, a porthole reflects a dot of light that darts towards me,
skitters back to refuge in the boat, gleams out again, and timidly retreats,
like a thought that comes almost to mind but slips away into the general glare.
An inflatable tender, tethered to the stern, just skims the commotion of the wake:
within it will be oars, a miniature motor, and, tucked into a pocket, life vests.
Such reassuring redundancy: don’t we desire just such an accessory, faith perhaps,
or at a certain age to be comforted, not daunted, by knowing one will really die?
To bring all that with you, by compulsion admittedly, but on such a slender leash,
and so maneuverable it is, tractable, so nearly frictionless, no need to strain;
though it might have to rush a little to keep up, you hardly know it’s there:
that insouciant headlong scurry, that always ardent leaping forwards into place.
Risk
Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious
about crisis, calamity, disaster, or unknowingly crave them.
These horrific conditionals, these expected unexpecteds,
we dwell on them, flinch, feint, steel ourselves:
but mightn’t our forebodings actually precede anxiety?
Isn’t so much sheer heedfulness emblematic of
desire?
How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade.
Of course, we’re rarely swept into events, other than domestic tumult,
from which awful consequences will ensue. Fortunately rarely.
And yet we sweat as fervently
for the most insipid issues of honor and unrealized ambition.
Lost brothership. Lost lust. We engorge our little sorrows,
beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.
Always, “These gigantic inconceivables.”
Always, “What will have been done to me?”
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?
House
The way you’d renovate a ruined house, keeping the “shell,” as we call it, brick, frame or stone,
and razing the rest: the inside walls — partitions, we say — then stairs, pipes, wiring, commodes,
saving only … no, save nothing this time; take the self-shell down to its emptiness, hollowness, void.
Down to the scabrous plaster, down to the lining bricks with mortar squashed through their joints,
down to the eyeless windows, the forlorn doorless doorways, the sprung joists powdery with rot;
down to the slab of the cellar, the erratically stuccoed foundation, the black earth underneath all.
Down under all to the ancient errors, indolence, envy, pretension, the frailties as though in the gene;
down to where consciousness cries, “Make me new,” but pleads as pitiably, “Cherish me as I was.”
Down to the swipe of the sledge, the ravaging bite of the pick; rubble, wreckage, vanity: the abyss.
Naked
Pissing out the door of a cottage
in an after-squall wind before dawn
in the tame hill country of Wales,
farms everywhere, fences and hedgerows,
but still enough strangeness, precipitous
pastures, patches of woods shadowing
tangles of one-car-wide lanes,
to take you out of yourself for a time,
so, naked under the low lintel,
an unaffrighting darkness before you,
so much of a washed-clean breeze
with so many temperate pulses and currents
of sleek, sensitive air languorously
touching across then seemingly through you,
how not delight to imagine dawn’s
first wash moving through you as well,
barns, trees, and crouched shrubs
blockily coming to themselves within you;
then cockcrow, birds chirring
awake, and the silence, too, within
and without, as you turn away, leaving
the old patched door ajar
to breathe in the last wisps of night,
the already headily fragrant field-scents.
Glass
I’d have thought by now it would have stopped,
as anything sooner or later will stop, but still it happens
that when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in a mirror,
there’s a kind of concussion, a cringe; I look quickly away.
Lately, since my father died and I’ve come closer to his age,
I sometimes see him first, and have to focus to find myself.
I’ve thought it’s that, my precious singularity being diluted,
but it’s harsher than that, crueler, the way, when I was young,
I believed how you looked was supposed to
mean,
something graver, more substantial: I’d gaze at my poor face
and think, “It’s still not there.” Apparently I still do.
What isn’t there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less.
Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us?
All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we’re after is just a less abrasive regard:
not “It’s still not there,” but something like “Come in, be still.”
Shoe
A pair of battered white shoes have been left out all night on a sill across the way.
One, the right, has its toe propped against the pane so that it tilts oddly upwards,
and there’s an abandon in its attitude, an elevation, that reminds me of a satyr on a vase.
A fleece of summer ivy casts the scene into deep relief, and I see the creature perfectly:
surrounded by his tribe of admiring women, he glances coolly down at his own lifted foot,
caught exactly at the outset of the frenzied leaping which will lift all of them to rapture.
The erotic will diffused directly into matter: you can sense his menacing lasciviousness,
his sensual glaze, his delight in being flagrant, so confidently more than merely mortal,
separate from though hypercritically aware of earthly care, of our so amusing earthly woe.
All that carnal scorn which in his dimension is a fitting emblem for his energy and grace,
but which in our meager world would be hubris, arrogance, compensation for some lack or loss,
or for that passion to be other than we are that with a shock of longing takes me once again.
Dream
Strange that one’s deepest split from oneself
should be enacted in those banal and inevitable
productions of the double dark of sleep.
Despite all my broodings about dream,
I never fail to be amazed by the misery
I inflict on myself when I’m supposedly at rest.
Rest? In last night’s dream my beloved announced to me,
and to others in the dream as well, that her desire was …
to not limit her range of sexual choice.
I implored her, but she wouldn’t respond.
Why would characters in one’s own dream
share with the waking world such awful unknowability?
Dreams are said to enact unfulfilled needs,
discords we can’t admit to ourselves,
but I’ve never been able to believe that.
I dream pain, dream grief, dream shame,
I cry out, wake in terror:
is there something in me that
requires
such torment?
There used to be books of dream:
every dream had symbolic meaning.
And the old Chinese believed
that dreams implied their reversal:
a dream of travel meant you’d stay home,
to dream of death meant longer life.
Yes, yes! Surely my beloved in my dream
was saying she loved only me.
The coolness in your eyes, love, was really heat,
your wish to range was your renewal of allegiance;
those prying others were you and I ourselves,
beholding one another’s fealty, one another’s fire.
Mad dreams! Mad love!
The Cup
What was going through me at that time of childhood
when my mother drinking her morning coffee would drive me wild with loathing and despair?
Every day, her body hunched with indignation at having had to leave its sleep,
her face without its rouge an almost mortal pale,
she’d stand before the stove and wait until the little turret on the coffeepot subsided,