Authors: C. K. Williams
The hunger, the rising, again and again until again itself seemed to be need and hunger
and so much terror could rise out of that, the hunger repeating itself out of the fear now,
that how could you know if you lived within it at all, if there wasn’t another,
a malediction or old prayer, a dream or a city of dream or a single, fleshless, dreamless error,
whose tongue you were, who spoke with you, butted or rasped with you, but still, tongue or another,
word or not word, what could it promise that wouldn’t drive us back to the same hunger and sorrow?
What could it say that wouldn’t spasm us back to ourselves to be bait or a dead prayer?
Or was that it? Only that? The prayer hunting its prey, hunting the bait of itself?
Was the hunger the faith in itself, the belief in itself, even the prayer?
Was it the dead prayer?
2.
The faces waver; each gathers the others within it, the others shuddering through it
as though there were tides or depths, as though the depths, the tides of the eyes themselves
could throw out refractions, waves, shifts and wavers and each faceless refraction
could rise to waver beneath me, to shift, to be faceless again, beneath or within me,
the lying, confusion, recurrence, reluctance, the surge through into again.
Each room, each breast finding its ripeness of shadow, each lip and its shadow,
the dimming, flowing, the waver through time, through loss, gone, irredeemable,
all of it, each face into regret, each room into forgetting and absence.
But still, if there were a moment, still, one moment, to begin in or go back to,
to return to move through, waver through, only a single moment carved back from the lie
the way the breast is carved from its shadow, sealed from the dross of darkness
until it takes the darkness itself and fills with it, taking the breath;
if, in the return, I could be taken the way I could have been taken, with voice or breast,
emptied against the space of the breast as though breast was breath and my breath,
taken, would have been emptied into the moment, it could rise here, now, in that moment, the same moment.
But it won’t, doesn’t. The moments lift and fall, break, and it shifts, wavers,
subsides into the need again, the faceless again, the faceless and the lie.
3.
Remorse? Blame? There is a pit-creature. The father follows it down with the ax.
Exile and sorrow. Once there were things we lived in, don’t you remember?
We scraped, starved, then we came up, abashed, to the sun, and what was the first word?
Blame, blame and remorse, then sorrow, then the blame was the father then was ourselves.
Such a trite story, do we have to retell it? The mother took back the sun and we …
Remorse, self-regard, call it shame or being abashed or trying again, for the last time, to return.
Remorse, then power, the power and the blame and what did we ever suffer but power?
The head lifting itself, then the wars, remorse and revenge, the wars of humility,
the blades and the still valley, the double intention, the simple tree in the blood.
Then exile again, even the sword, even the spear, the formula scratched on the sand,
even the christening, the christened, blame again, power again, but even then,
taken out of the fire at the core and never returned, what could we not sanction?
One leg after the other, the look back, the power, the fire again and the sword again.
Blame and remorse. That gives in to desire again, in to hunger again. That gives in to … this …
4.
Someone … Your arm touches hers or hers finds yours, unmoving, unasking.
A silence, as though for the first time, and as though for the first time, you can listen,
as though there were chords: your life, then the other’s, someone else, as though for the first time.
The life of the leaves over the streetlamp and the glow, swelling, chording, under the shadows,
and the quaver of things built, one quavering cell at a time, and the song
of the cell gently bedding itself in its mortar, in this silence, this first attempting.
Even the shush of cars, the complex stress of a step, the word called into the darkness,
and, wait, the things even beyond, beyond membrane or awareness, mode, sense, dream,
don’t they sing, too? Chord, too? Isn’t the song and the silence there, too?
I heard it once. It changed nothing, but once, before I went on, I did hear:
the equation of star and plant, the wheel, the ecstasy and division, the equation again.
The absolute walking its planks, its long wall, its long chord of laughter or grief.
I heard silence, then the children, the spawn, how we have to teach every cell how to speak,
and from that, after that, the kiss back from the speech, the touch back from the song.
And then more, I heard how it alters, how we, the speakers, the can’t-live, the refuse-to,
how we, only in darkness, groaning and thrashing into the undergrowth of our eternal,
would speak then, would howl, howl again, and at last, at the end, we’d hear it:
the prayer and the flesh crying,
Why aren’t you here?
And the cry back in it,
I am! I am!
5.
Imagine dread. Imagine, without symbol, without figure, history or histories; a place, not a place.
Imagine it must be risen through, beginning with the silent moment, the secrets quieted,
one hour, one age at a time, sadness, nostalgia, the absurd pain of betrayal.
Through genuine grief, then, through the genuine suffering for the boundaries of self
and the touch on the edge, the compassion, that never, never quite, breaks through.
Imagine the touch again and beyond it, beyond either end, joy or terror, either ending,
the context that gives way, not to death, but past, past anything still with a name,
even death, because even death is a promise offering comfort, solace, that any direction we turn,
there’ll still be the word, the name, and this the promise now, even with terror,
the promise again that the wordlessness and the self won’t be for one instant the same enacting,
and we stay within it, a refusal now, a turning away, a never giving way,
we stay until even extinction itself, the absence, death itself, even death, isn’t longed for,
never that, but turned toward in the deepest turn of the self, the deepest gesture toward self.
And then back, from the dread, from locution and turn, from whatever history reflects us,
the self grounds itself again in itself and reflects itself, even its loss, as its own,
and back again, still holding itself back, the certainty and belief tearing again,
back from the edge of that one flood of surrender which, given space, would, like space itself,
rage beyond any limit, the flesh itself giving way in its terror, and back from that,
into love, what we have to call love, the one moment before we move onwards again,
towards the end, the life again of the self-willed, self-created, embodied, reflected again.
Imagine a space prepared for with hunger, with dread, with power and the power
over dread which is dread, and the love, with no space for itself, no power for itself,
a moment, a silence, a rising, the terror for that, the space for that. Imagine love.
6.
Morning. The first morning of now. You, your touch, your song and morning, but still,
something, a last fear or last lie or last clench of confusion clings,
holds back, refuses, resists, the way fear itself clings in its web of need or dread.
What would release be? Being forgiven? No, never forgiven, never only forgiven.
To be touched, somehow, with presence, so that the only sign is a step, towards or away?
Or not even a step, because the walls, of self, of dread, can never release,
can never forgive stepping away, out of the willed or refused, out of the lie or the fear
of the self that still holds back and refuses, resists, and turns back again and again into the willed.
What if it could be, though? The first, hectic rush past guilt or remorse?
What if we could find a way through the fires that aren’t with us and the terrors that are?
What would be there? Would we be thrown back into perhaps or not yet or not needed or done?
Could we even slip back, again, past the first step into the first refusal,
the first need, first blot of desire that still somehow exists and wants to resist, wants to give back the hard,
immaculate shell of the terror it still keeps against respite and unclenching?
Or perhaps no release, no step or sign, perhaps only to wait and accept.
Perhaps only to bless. To bless and to bless and to bless and to bless.
Willed or unwilled, word or sign, the word suddenly filled with its own breath.
Self and other the self within other and the self still moved through its word,
consuming itself, still, and consuming, still being rage, war, the fear, the aghast,
but bless, bless still, even the fear, the loss, the gutting of word, the gutting even of hunger,
but still to bless and bless, even the turn back, the refusal, to bless and to bless and to bless.
7.
The first language was loss, the second sorrow, this is the last, then: yours …
An island, summer, late dusk; hills, laurel and thorn. I walked from the harbor, over the cliff road,
down the long trail through the rocks. When I came to our house the ship’s wake was just edging onto the shore
and on the stone beach, under the cypress, the low waves reassuming themselves in the darkness, I waited.
There was a light in a room. You came to it, leaned to it, reaching, touching,
and watching you, I saw you give back to the light a light more than light
and to the silence you gave more than silence, and, in the silence, I heard it.
You, your self, your life, your beginning, pleasure, song clear as the light that touched you.
Your will, your given and taken; grief, recklessness, need or desire.
Your passion or tear, step forward or step back into the inevitable veil.
Yours and yours and yours, the dream, the wall of the self that won’t be or needn’t be breached,
and the breach, the touch, yours and the otherness, yours, the separateness,
never giving way, never breached really, but as simple, always, as light, as silence.
This is the language of that, that light and that silence, the silence rising through or from you.
Nothing to bless or not bless now, nothing to thank or forgive, not to triumph,
surrender, mean, reveal, assume or exhaust. Our faces bent to the light, and still,
there is terror, still history, power, grief and remorse, always, always the self and the other
and the endless tide, the waver, the terror again, between and beneath, but you, now,
your touch, your light, the otherness yours, the reach, the wheel, the waves touching.
And to, not wait, not overcome, not even forget or forgive the dream of the moment, the unattainable moment again.
Your light … Your silence …
In the silence, without listening, I heard it, and without words, without language or breath, I answered.
TAR
[1983]
From My Window
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded — I hadn’t noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.
Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.
A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine,
and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the block
and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me,
their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.
I know where they’re going — to the “Legion”: once, when I was putting something out, they stopped,
both drunk that time, too, both reeking — it wasn’t ten o’clock — and we chatted for a bit.
I don’t know how they stay alive — on benefits most likely. I wonder if they’re lovers?
They don’t look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along,
contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters,
tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat,
his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down,
to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.
In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show.
Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they’re not, at least, thank god, laughing.
Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.
Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.
He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot
catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down,
set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.
No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber,
the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair,