Authors: C. K. Williams
has been banging his head on the window for hours;
you’d think by now he’d be brain-dead, but no,
he flings himself at the pane: hammer, hammer again.
I ease around him to open the sash, hoping
he doesn’t sting me because then I’d be sorry
I didn’t kill him, but he pays me no mind:
it’s still fling, hammer, fling, hammer again.
I’m sure his brain’s safe, his bones are outside,
but up there mine are too, so why does it hurt
so much to keep thinking — hammer, hammer —
the same things again and, hammer, again?
That invisible barrier between you and the world,
between you and your truth … Stinger blunted,
wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain,
only the hammer, hammer, hammer again.
On the Métro
On the métro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book — Cioran,
The Temptation to Exist
— and notice her glancing up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,
she’s
present
in a way she hadn’t been before; though she hasn’t moved an inch, she’s allowed herself
to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark
her strong figure and very tan skin — (how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer).
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged,
known.
I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,
but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:
a memory — a lovely girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school,
our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,
my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.
The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,
and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,
(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,
(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again
as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.
Peggy
The name of the horse of my friend’s friend,
a farmer’s son whose place we’d pass
when we rode out that way I remember,
not his name, just his mare’s, Peggy,
a gleaming, well-built gray; surprising,
considering her one-stall plank shed.
I even recall where they lived,
Half-Acre Road — it sounds like Frost,
and looked it: unpaved, silos and barns.
I went back not long ago;
it’s built up, with rows on both sides
of bloated tract mansions.
One lot was still empty,
so I stopped and went through and found
that behind the wall of garages and hydrants
the woods had stayed somehow intact,
and wild, wilder; the paths overgrown,
the derelict pond a sink of weeds.
We’d gallop by there, up a hill,
our horses’ flanks foaming with sweat,
then we’d skirt Peggy’s fields
and cross to more woods, then a meadow,
the scent of which once, mown hay,
was so sweet I taste it still.
But now, the false-mullioned windows,
the developer’s scrawny maples, the lawns —
I didn’t know what to do with it all,
it just ached, like forgetting someone
you love is dead, and wanting to call them,
and then you remember, and they’re dead again.
Fish
On the sidewalk in front
of a hairdresser’s supply store
lay the head of a fish,
largish, pointy, perhaps a pike’s.
It must recently have been left there;
its scales shone and its visible eye
had enough light left in it still
so it looked as they will for awhile
astonished and disconsolate
to have been brought to such a pass:
its incision was clean, brutal, precise;
it had to have come in one blow.
In the showcase window behind,
other heads, women’s and men’s,
bewigged, painstakingly coiffed,
stared out, as though at the fish,
as though stunned, aghast, too —
though they were hardly surprised:
hadn’t they known all along
that life, that frenzy, that folly,
that flesh-thing, would come
sooner or later to this? It hurts,
life, just as much as it might,
and it ends, always, like this.
Better stay here, with eyes of glass,
like people in advertisements,
and without bodies or blood,
like people in poems.
The Blade
November 3, 2004
1.
Usually I don’t mind that being out of the city now
means still having to endure the drone of planes,
traffic on the ubiquitous highways, mowers and pumps;
they’ve become almost a part of the music of nature,
but this morning, the builder’s men clearing the woods
facing our house, the roar of their truck hauling away
the old oaks and the screech of the blade of their dozer
scraping the stony soil, seem beyond bearing.
2.
Though I know all too well it’s the lost election,
the sense of not only disappointment but betrayal,
of realizing a campaign could succeed by relying
entirely on fearmongering, slander and lies.
And beyond that a foreboding: always before,
whatever party of regression has been in ascendance,
the under-voices of conciliation and reason
were audible somehow: can anyone claim that now?
3.
In Spain, during the reign of Franco, I blundered
into a rally the tyrant had arranged for himself. A butcher,
who’d jailed them for decades in a dark ages of army
and church, the people couldn’t cheer him enough.
For a moment, when the swarming mob surged,
I was lifted from my feet and swept towards a line of tanks:
frightening, that mass of bodies heaving against me,
pulling me down, that having to fight not to fall.
4.
So far off on a hill I can’t hear him,
a farmer is plowing his fields for the spring wheat.
Just across, though, the excavators hammer
and grunt and whine, unfurling a fog of diesel
that fumes out over the stumps and slashed earth,
and hangs there, as though the ground itself was afire.
It thins when the wind shifts, but still my eyes sting,
and my mouth still tastes of oil and lead.
Miniature Poodle
Her shipboard lover had sent her ahead
to the already full hotel where I was staying
and decamped I heard her sobbing in the lobby
so offered to find her and her poodle a place
to stay and did and she asked me to dinner.
Were we lovers too? Absurd I was nineteen
she fifty at least and alone so alone I’d see her
wherever I went that summer Rome Florence
standing misplacedly on a corner ridiculous dog
in her arms no reason to go one way or another.
She looked more faded each time I saw her
though now the years crumpled behind me
she seems not old at all not gray as I am
not ill as I am my death sniffing at me yes
like a dog jamming its snout in my crotch.
I watched hers that night spoiled thing
as she cut up its meat she wholly absorbed
I scornful as usual never imagining
I’d ever attend with equivalent inappropriateness
to my own obsessions my own mortal disquiet.
Plums
1.
All the beautiful poems
about plum trees in flower,
gold in the moonlight,
silver in the silvery starlight,
and not one of them mentions
that the damned things
if you don’t pay attention
will pull themselves apart.
2.
A perfect wall of the hard
green globules of pubescent
plums too late we found
deep in the foliage of ours,
both largest limbs
already fatally fractured
had to be amputated,
the incisions sealed with tar.
3.
None of the poems mentions
either that when the hiding
fruit falls, the same flies
that invade to inhabit
fresh dog shit are all at once
there in the muck of the plums
already rotting their flesh
off as fast as they can.
4.
Abuzz, ablaze, the flies
crouch in the ooze,
like bronze lions it looks like,
drooling it looks like
at the chance to sink up
to their eyes in the rankness,
to suck gorgeously
at the swill.
5.
While our once-lovely tree
waits naked in the naked
day-glare for branches
to bring leaves forth again,
and fruit forth, not for us,
or the flies, but just to be
gold again in the moonlight,
silver in the silvery starlight.
Rats
August 2005
1.
From beneath the bank
of the brook, in the first
searing days
of the drought, water
rats appeared,
two of them,
we’d never known
even were there.
Unlike city
rats skulking
in cellars or sliding
up from a sewer-
mouth — I saw this,
it wasn’t dusk —
these, as blithe
as toy tanks,
sallied into the garden
to snitch the crusts
we’d set
out for the birds.
But still, who
knows what filth
and fetor and rot
down in their dark
world they were
before? I shouted
and sent them
hurtling back.
2.
Now the brute
crucible of heat
has been upon us
for weeks,
just breathing is work,
and we’re frightened.
The planet all
but afire, glaciers
dissolving, deserts
on the march,
hurricanes without end,
and the president
and his energy-company
cronies still insist
global warming
isn’t real. The rats
rove where they will
now, shining and fat,
they’ve appropriated
the whole lawn.
From this close,
they look just
like their cousins
anywhere else,
devious, ruthless,
rapacious, and every
day I loathe
them more.
Again
1.
On a PBS program, one of my favorites,
a philosopher, or historian of philosophy,
I never quite know the difference,
but whichever she is, in her conviction,
in the passionate cogency with which
she discusses the theme of her new book — evil —
her erudition and dedication are manifest:
evil exists, she says her book says.
2.
Now her interlocutor, earnest as always,
solicitous, gently inquisitive, asks
what is obviously meant to be his last,
most crucial question, the answer to which
will resolve various other critical issues
for which there’s no time (her time is up):
“And do you believe,” he asks her,
“there is a moral order in the world?”
3.
She hesitates; her lips part to speak,
but she doesn’t; they part again,
she’s thinking fast, you can tell,
her machine’s on high, but still nothing,
until, with his smile of compassionate tact,
the host offers: “If you don’t know, who does?”
and she, with relief, “It depends on the day —
sometimes I think so, sometimes I don’t.”
4.
Well, no great solace there,
one might even be put out a bit.
Isn’t this supposedly very wise person saying
that her vision of the human adventure,
her conclusions after years of reflection
and analysis, depend on her
mood,
on the perceptions and thoughts and emotions
which most recently passed through her?
5.
Isn’t she implying that the cosmos
might have some coherence coaxed from it,
but that tomorrow the same evidence
might entail its contrary, or its tragic qualification?
Have all her intellectual efforts come to this?
Has she, and by extension we, not advanced
beyond the most primitive cogitation,
the most conditional, quotidian blurt?
6.
But really, why all the fuss?
What was I expecting? A “moral order” —
does it make any difference if there is
one or not? Does anything change?
Would anyone suffer less, or love more?
Would evil not exist? Whose evil?
Philosophy, ethics, the mind: fuck it all.
And while you’re about it, fuck TV.