Authors: C. K. Williams
intestine on my tongue the taste of active
not theoretical not imagined despair.
It wasn’t only the deserts impinging
encroaching devouring nor the fevers
charring the last damp from the rivers
the last lick of sap from the withering wheat.
Nor only the ruins of cities spilled out
on highways like coal like kindling the men
groin to groin bound in their rage and despair
like Siamese twins Siamese hordes.
It wasn’t the women cowled like turbines
howling like turbines and the children
sentried on cliffs with nothing to nourish
their genius but shrapnels of scrub.
It was grasping rather that their desires
were like mine without limit like mine
checked only by vile chance not rational
supply and demand as I’d been taught.
That their fear was so fierce they wanted
to no longer be endowed with matter
so when houses were built they were razed
when food was grown it was despoiled.
We were locusts we were scorpions
husks hooked on thorns seeds without soil
wombs of a world without portal
flesh and dream we breathed and we slept.
The Clause
This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness,
this wedge of want my mind calls self,
this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching,
keeps referring, keeps aspiring, longing, towards some state
from which ambiguity would be banished, uncertainty expunged;
this implement my mind and self imagine they might make together,
which would have everything accessible to it,
all our doings and undoings all at once before it,
so it would have at last the right to bless, or blame,
for without everything before you, all at once, how bless, how blame?
this capacity imagination, self and mind conceive might be the “soul,”
which would be able to regard such matters as creation and destruction,
origin and extinction, of species, peoples, even families, even mine,
of equal consequence, and might finally solve the quandary
of this thing of being, and this other thing of not;
these layers, these divisions, these meanings or the lack thereof,
these fissures and abysses beside which I stumble, over which I reel:
is the place, the space, they constitute,
which I never satisfactorily experience but from which the fear
I might be torn away appalls me, me, or what might most be me?
Even mine,
I say, as if I might ever believe such a thing;
bless and blame,
I say, as though I could ever not.
This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built assemblage,
this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum of me,
is this where I’m meant to end, exactly where I started out?
Leaves
A pair of red leaves spinning on one another
in such wildly erratic patterns over a frozen field
it’s hard to tell one from another and whether
if they were creatures they’d be in combat or courting
or just exalting in the tremendousness of their being.
Humans can be like that, capricious, aswirl,
not often enough in exalting, but courting, yes,
and combat; so often in combat, in rancor, in rage,
we rarely even remember what error or lie
set off this phase of our seeming to have to slaughter.
Not leaves then, which after all in their season
give themselves to the hammer of winter,
become sludge, become muck, become mulch,
while we, still seething, broiling, stay as we are,
vexation and violence, ax, atom, despair.
Night
1.
Somehow a light plane
coming in low at three
in the morning to a local airstrip
hits a complex of tones
in its growl so I hear mingled
with it a peal of church bells,
swelling in and out
of audibility, arrhythmic,
but rich and insistent, then,
though I try to hold them,
they dissolve, fade away;
only that monochrome
drone bores on
alone through the dark.
2.
This is one of our new
winters, dry, windless
and warm, when even
the lightest cover is stifling.
A luxuriant flowering
pear tree used to shelter
the front of our house,
but last August a storm
took it, a bizarrely focused
miniature tornado never
before seen in this climate,
and now the sky outside
the window is raw, the inert
air viscous and sour.
3.
I was ill, and by the merest
chance happened to be
watching as the tree fell,
I saw the branches helplessly
flail, the fork of the trunk
with a great creak split,
and the heavier half start
down, catch on wires,
and hang, lifting and subsiding
in the last barbs of the gale
as though it didn’t know yet
it was dead, then it did,
and slipped slowly sideways
onto its own debris in the gutter.
4.
When Ivan Karamazov
is reciting his wracking disquisition
about the evils perpetrated
on children, opining whether
human salvation would be worth
a single child’s suffering,
you know he’s close to breaking
down, sobbing in shame
and remorse, and I wonder
if he’d imagined our whole planet,
the children with it,
wagered in a mad gamble
of world against wealth,
what would he have done?
5.
What do I do? Fret
mostly, and brood, and lie
awake. Not to sleep
wasn’t always so punishing.
Once, in a train, stalled
in mountains, in snow,
I was roused by the clank
of a trainman’s crowbar
on the undercarriage of my car.
I lifted the leathery shade
and across a moon-dazzled
pine-fringed slope
a fox cut an arc; everything
else was pure light.
6.
I wanted it to last forever,
but I was twenty, and before
I knew it was back in my dream.
Do I ever sleep that way
now, innocent of everything
beyond my ken? No,
others are always with me,
others I love with my life,
yet I’ll leave them scant
evidence of my care, and little
trace of my good intentions,
as little as the solacing shush
the phantom limbs of our slain
tree will leave on the night.
In the Forest
In a book about war, tyranny, oppression, political insanity and corruption,
in a prison camp, in a discussion in which some inmates are trying to contend
with a vision of a world devoid of real significance, of existence being no more
than brute violence, of the human propensity to destroy itself and everything else,
someone, an old man, presumably wise, tells of having once gone to live in a forest,
far in the North, pristine, populated by no one but poor woodsmen and hermits;
he went there, he says, because he thought in that mute, placid domain of the trees,
he might find beyond the predations of animals and men something like the good.
They’d been speaking of their absurd sentences, of the cruelty of so-called civilization,
and the listeners imagine the old man is going to share his innocent rapture,
but No, he says, No, the trees and their seeds and flowers are at war just as we are,
every inch of soil is a battleground, each species of tree relentlessly seeks its own ends;
first the insidious grass and shrubs must be conquered, so a billion seeds are deployed,
hard as bullets, the victorious shoots drive up through the less adaptable weaklings,
the alliances of dominating survivors grow thicker and taller, assembling the canopies
beneath which humans love to loll, yet still new enemies are evolving, with new weapons …
In prison camps, even the worst, in the evening the tormented souls come together
to commune and converse, even those utterly sapped by their meaningless toil,
those afflicted by wounds of the spirit more doleful than any we can imagine,
even there, in that moral murk that promises nothing but extinction, the voices go on.
Does it matter what words are spoken? That the evidence proves one thing or another?
Isn’t the ultimate hope just that we’ll still be addressed, and know others are, too,
that meanings will still be devised and evidence offered of lives having been lived?
“In the North, the trees…” and the wretched page turns, and we listen, and listen.
The Hearth
February 2003
1.
Alone after the news on a bitter
evening in the country, sleet slashing
the stubbled fields, the river ice;
I keep stirring up the recalcitrant fire,
but when I throw my plastic coffee cup
in with new kindling it perches intact
on a log for a strangely long time,
as though uncertain what to do,
until, in a somehow reluctant, almost
creaturely way, it dents, collapses
and decomposes to a dark slime
untwining itself on the stone hearth.
I once knew someone who was caught in a fire
and made it sound something like that.
He’d been loading a bomber and a napalm shell
had gone off; flung from the flames,
at first he felt nothing and thought
he’d been spared, but then came the pain,
then the hideous dark — he’d been blinded,
and so badly charred he spent years
in recovery: agonizing debridements,
grafts, learning to speak through a mouth
without lips, to read Braille with fingers
lavaed with scar, to not want to die —
though that never happened. He swore,
even years later, with a family,
that if he were back there, this time allowed
to put himself out of his misery, he would.
2.
There was dying here tonight, after
dusk, by the road; an owl,
eyes fixed and flared, breast
so winter-white he seemed to shine
a searchlight on himself, helicoptered
near a wire fence, then suddenly
banked, plunged and vanished
into the swallowing dark with his prey.
Such an uncomplicated departure;
no detonation, nothing to mourn;
if the creature being torn from its life
made a sound, I didn’t hear it.
But in fact I wasn’t listening, I was thinking,
as I often do these days, of war;
I was thinking of my children, and their children,
of the more than fear I feel for them,
and then of radar, rockets, shrapnel,
cities razed, soil poisoned
for a thousand generations; of suffering so vast
it nullifies everything else.
I stood in the wind in the raw cold
wondering how those with power over us
can effect such things, and by what
cynical reasoning pardon themselves.
The fire’s ablaze now, its glow
on the windows makes the night even darker,
but it barely keeps the room warm.
I stoke it again, and crouch closer.
Low Relief
They hunted lions, they hunted humans, and enslaved them.
One lion, I recall, had been viciously speared; he vomited blood,
his hindquarters dragged behind him like cement in a sack.
Spirits with wings and the heads of eagles flanked them;
the largest sports a rosette on a band on his wrist, like a watch:
a wristwatch measuring blossomings, measuring lives.
They wore skirts, helmets, their beards were permanent-waved.
Carved in stone, enameled in brick, in chariots, on thrones,
always that resolute, unblinking profile of composure.
Did they as they hunted feel sure of themselves,
did they believe they enacted what their cosmos demanded?
Did a god ring through them like a phone going off on a bus?
On each block, each slab, each surface, a slave,
each bound with a cable of what must feel like steel;
their heads loll: hear them cry pitiably into the stone.
Did they have gods who were evil others, like ours?
Even colder than they, indifferent, more given to fury,
vindictive, venomous, stutteringly stupid, like ours?
Their forearms were striated like Blake’s ghost of a flea’s,
they never savaged themselves in their souls, though;
how lightly they bear the weight of their extinction.
Coherence, things in proper relation, did it fail them?
Was unreason all around, and confusion and depression,
and no coherent, convincing model to explain why?
They move left to right, right to left, like lanes of traffic.
They too, perhaps, found no place to stand still, to judge,
to believe wickedness will never be forgotten nor forgiven.
Also gazelles, beasts of the air, and eyes which contain,
and ears which submit; dew of morn, blaze of noon,
the faces before you wild with the erotics of existence.
And that coming someday to know how foolish,
even confronting the end of one’s world, to think
one might spare oneself by doing away with oneself.
Their palace doors were cedar strapped with stout bronze.