Authors: C. K. Williams
Perhaps it isn’t as we like to think, the last resort, the end of something
Pissing out the door of a cottage
Please try to understand, it was only one small moment, it didn’t mean a
Possibly because she’s already so striking — tall, well dressed, very clear
probably death fits all right in the world
Rather die than live through dying with it: rather perish absolutely now
Remember me? I was the one
right off we started inflicting history
Saddening, worse, to read in “Frost at Midnight,”
Seven hundred tons per inch, I read, is the force in a bomb or shell in
Shabby, tweedy, academic, he was old enough to be her father and I
She answers the bothersome telephone, takes the message, forgets the
She began to think that jealousy was only an excuse, a front, for some-
She could tell immediately, she said, that he was Jewish, although he
She keeps taking poses as they eat so that her cool glance goes off at
Shells of fearful insensitivity that I keep having to disadhere from my
She’s magnificent, as we imagine women must be
She was fourteen and a half; she’d hanged herself: how had she ever
She would speak of “our relationship” as though it were a thing apart
Slate scraps, split stone, third hand splintering timber; rusted nails and
Snapshots of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are scattered on
somebody keeps track of how many times
Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were com-
Somehow a light plane
Someone has folded a coat under the boy’s head, someone else, an Arab
Some people
something to dip myself into
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying
“Sometimes I feel as though all I really want is to take his little whizzer
Sometimes she’d begin to sing to herself before she was out of bed
So much crap in my head
So often and with such cruel fascination I have dreamed the implacable
So quickly, and so slowly … In the tiny elevator of the flat you’d bor-
Special: Big Tits,
says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our
Splendid that I’d revel even more in the butterflies harvesting pollen
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar
Stalled an hour beside a row of abandoned, graffiti-stricken factories
Strange that one’s deepest split from oneself
Strange that sexual jealousy should be so much like sex itself: the same
Such longing, such urging, such warmth towards, such force towards, so
suppose I move a factory
“Tell me to touch your breast,” I wanted to say: “Please, please, please
That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a
That girl I didn’t love, then because she was going to leave me, loved
That moment when the high-wire walker suddenly begins to falter, wob-
That old documentary about the miners’ strike in Harlan County, the
That was the future I came back from
The almost deliciously ill, dank, dark algae on the stone of its sides
The book goes fluttering crazily through the space of my room towards
The bench he’s lying on isn’t nearly wide enough for the hefty bulk of
The boss, the crane operator, one of the workers, a friend of somebody in
The boy had badly malformed legs, and there was a long, fresh surgical
The bus that won’t arrive this freezing, bleak, pre-Sabbath afternoon
The cry of a woman making love in a room giving onto our hotel court-
The ever-consoling fantasy of my early adolescence was that one day
The father has given his year-old son
Le Monde
to play with in his
The first morning of mist after days of draining, unwavering heat along
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncer-
the goddamned animals might know more than we do about some things
the grandmas are all coming down like f-101’s like gulls
The just-fledged baby owl a waiter has captured under a tree near the
The last party before I left was in an old, run-down apartment house
The lesbian couple’s lovely toddler daughter has one pierced ear with a
the little children have been fighting
the lonely people are marching
The man who owns sleep
The Maya-Quechua Indians plodding to market on feet as flat and tough
The men working on the building going up here have got these great
The middle of the night, she’s wide awake, carefully lying as far away as
The morning is so gray that the grass is gray and the side of the white
The mummified spider hung in its own web in the rafters striped legs
The name of the horse of my friend’s friend
the nations have used up their desire
the not want
The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in love with some-
the only way it makes sense
… The part where he’s telling himself at last the no longer deniable
the pillows are going insane
The plaster had been burnt from the studs, the two-by-four joists were
the president of my country his face flushed
there are people whose sex
There hasn’t been any rain
There is a world somewhere else that is unendurable
there’s no no like money’s
there’s no such thing as death everybody
there’s somebody who’s dying
There was absolutely no reason after the centaur had pawed her and
There was nothing I could have done —
there was this lady once she used to grow
“There were two of them but nobody knew at first because only one hap-
There will always be an issue: doctrine, dogma, differences of con-
The science-fiction movie on the telly in which the world, threatened by
These things that came into my mind
The snow is falling in three directions at once against the sienna brick of
The space within me, within which I partly, or possibly mostly exist
The trouble with me is that whether I get love or not
The way, her father dead a day ago, the child goes in his closet, finds her-
The way, playing an instrument, when you botch a passage you have to
The way boxers postulate a feeling to label that with which they over-
The way it always feels like the early onset of an illness, the viral armies
The way she tells it, they were in the Alps or somewhere, tall, snow-
The way someone stays home, that’s all, stays in the house, in the room
The way these days she dresses with more attention to go out to pass the
The way the voice always, always gives it away, even when you weren’t
the way we get under cars and in
The way you’d renovate a ruined house, keeping the “shell,” as we call it
The whole lower panel of the chain-link fence girdling my old grammar
The whole time I’ve been walking down the block the public phone at
… The word alone sizzles like boiling acid, moans like molten lead
The world’s greatest tricycle-rider
They are pounded into the earth
They can be fists punching the water —
They drift unobtrusively into the dream, they linger, then they depart
They hunted lions, they hunted humans, and enslaved them
The young girl jogging in mittens and skimpy gym shorts through a
They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so
They’re discussing the political situation they’ve been watching evolve in
They’re not quite overdressed, just a bit attentively, flashily for seventy-
They were so exceptionally well got-up for an ordinary Sunday afternoon
This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness
This is a story. You don’t have to think about it, it’s make-believe
This is before I’d read Nietzsche. Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even
this is fresh meat right mr nixon
This is the last day of the world. On the river docks
this knowledge so innocently it goes this sin
this poem is an onion
This time the holdup man didn’t know a video-sound camera hidden up
Though he’s sitting at the restaurant bar next to the most startlingly
Though no shyer than the others — while her pitch is being checked she
Though she’s seventy-four, has three children, five grown grandchildren
Three women old as angels
Time for my break; I’m walking from my study down the long hallway
Tugging with cocked thumbs at the straps of her old overalls the way
Two actors are awkwardly muscling a coffin out of a doorway draped in
Two maintenance men need half the morning probing just to find the
Uncanny to realize one was
here,
so much
Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that
Usually a large-caliber, dull-black, stockless machine gun hangs from a
Usually I don’t mind that being out of the city now
Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa!
the butcher we used to patronize in the
Violence in the dream, violation of body and spirit; torment, mutilation
Vivaldi’s
Stabat
“Water” was her answer and I fell instantly and I knew self-destructively
We’d wanted to make France
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
we got rid of the big people
Well here I
What could be more endearing, on a long, too quiet, lonely evening in
Whatever last slump of flesh
Whatever poison it had ingested or injury incurred had flung it in agony
Whatever the argument the young sailor on the train is having and
what if the revolution comes and I’m in it and my job
What is there which so approaches an art form in its stubborn patience
What was going through me at that time of childhood
what we need is one of those gods
When I offered to help her and took the arm
When I saw my son’s heart blown up in bland black and white on the
When I was about eight, I once stabbed somebody, another kid, a little
when I was sleeping this morning one of my feet
when jessie’s fever went up god got farther away so he could see better
When one of my oldest and dearest friends died and another friend
When she’s not looking in his eyes, she looks down at his lips, his chin
When she stopped by, just passing, on her way back from picking up the
When the ponies are let out at dusk, they pound across their pasture
When we finally tracked him down, the old man (not really all that very
Where is it where is it where is it in what volume what text what treatise
Where no question possibly remains — someone crying, someone dead —
Wherever Jessie and her friend Maura alight, clouds of young men sud-
which is worse the lieutenant raising his rifle
Why is he wearing a white confirmation suit — he’s only about three — on
Why this much fascination with you, little loves, why this what feels like
Willa Selenfriend likes Paul Peterzell better than she likes me and I am
With his shopping cart, his bags of booty and his wine, I’d always found
with huge jowls that wobble with sad o
Without quite knowing it, you sit looking for your past or future in the
Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, when the blue-haired lady in the doctor’s
You give no hint how shy you really are, so thoroughly your warm and
“You make me sick!” this, with rancor, vehemence, disgust — again, “You
You must never repeat this to
him,
but when I started seeing my guru was
your list of victims dear
ALSO BY C. K. WILLIAMS
POETRY
A Day for Anne Frank
Lies
I Am the Bitter Name
The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa)
With Ignorance
Tar
Flesh and Blood
Poems 1963–1983
Helen
A Dream of Mind
Selected Poems
The Vigil
Repair
Love About Love
The Singing
ESSAYS
Poetry and Consciousness
MEMOIR
Misgivings
TRANSLATIONS
Sophocles’ Women of Trachis
(with Gregory Dickerson)
The Bacchae of Euripides
Canvas,
by Adam Zagajewski (translated with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry)
Selected Poems of Francis Ponge
(with John Montague and Margaret Guiton)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2006 by C. K. Williams
All rights reserved
Published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First paperback edition, 2007
Some of the new poems in this volume originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications:
Agni Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Bat City, Faultline, The New Yorker, Nightsun, Ontario Review, Poetry, Poetry Now
(UK),
Slate, The Threepenny Review, Tikken,
and
VanGogh’s Ear.
All of the new poems appeared in a limited-edition chapbook,
Creatures
(Haverford, PA: Green Shade, 2006).
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-53099-0