Authors: C. K. Williams
Villanelle of the Suicide’s Mother
Self-Portrait with Rembrandt Self-Portrait
Although the chapbook of poems from Issa,
The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling.,
was published in 1983, the group of which they are a selection was composed from 1973 to 1976, so they have been placed here before
With Ignorance.
for
Owen and Sully and Turner
LIES
[1969]
A Day for Anne Frank
God hates you!
—
St. John Chrysostom
1.
I look onto an alley here
where, though tough weeds and flowers thrust up
through cracks and strain
toward the dulled sunlight,
there is the usual filth spilling from cans,
the heavy soot shifting in the gutters.
People come by mostly
to walk their dogs or take the shortcut
between the roaring main streets,
or just to walk
and stare up at the smoky windows,
but this morning when I looked out
children were there running back and forth
between the houses toward me.
They were playing with turtles —
skimming them down the street
like pennies or flat stones,
and bolting, shouting, after the broken corpses.
One had a harmonica, and as he ran,
his cheeks bloating and collapsing like a heart,
I could hear its bleat, and then the girls’ screams
suspended behind them with their hair,
and all of them: their hard, young breath,
their feet pounding wildly on the pavement to the corner.
2.
I thought of you at that age.
Little Sister, I thought of you,
thin as a door,
and of how your thighs would have swelled
and softened like cake,
your breasts have bleached
and the new hair growing on you like song
would have stiffened and gone dark.
There was rain for a while, and then not.
Because no one came, I slept again,
and dreamed that you were here with me,
snarled on me like wire,
tangled so closely to me that we were vines
or underbrush together,
or hands clenched.
3.
They are cutting babies in half on bets.
The beautiful sergeant has enough money to drink
for a week.
The beautiful lieutenant can’t stop betting.
The little boy whimpers
he’ll be good.
The beautiful cook is gathering up meat
for the dogs.
The beautiful dogs
love it all.
Their flanks glisten.
They curl up in their warm kennels
and breathe.
They breathe.
4.
Little Sister,
you are a clot
in the snow,
blackened,
a chunk of phlegm
or puke
and there are men with faces
leaning over you with watercans
watering you!
in the snow, as though flowers would sprout
from your armpits
and genitals.
Little Sister,
I am afraid of the flowers sprouting from you
I am afraid of the silver petals
that crackle
of the stems darting
in the wind
of the roots
5.
The twilight rots.
Over the greasy bridges and factories,
it dissolves
and the clouds swamp in its rose
to nothing.
I think sometimes the slag heaps by the river
should be bodies
and that the pods of moral terror
men make of their flesh should split
and foam their cold, sterile seeds into the tides
like snow
or ash.
6.
Stacks of hair were there
little mountains
the gestapo children must have played in
and made love in and loved
the way children love haystacks or mountains
O God the stink
of hair oil and dandruff
their mothers must have thrown them into their tubs
like puppies and sent them to bed
coming home so filthy stinking
of jew’s hair
of gold fillings, of eyelids
7.
Under me on a roof
a sparrow little by little
is being blown away.
A cage of bone is left,
part of its wings,
a stain.
8.
And in Germany the streetcar conductors go to work
in their stiff hats,
depositing workers and housewives
where they belong,
pulling the bell chains,
moving drive levers forward or back.
9.
I am saying goodbye to you before our death. Dear Father:
I am saying goodbye to you before my death. We are so
anxious to live, but all is lost — we are not allowed! I am
so afraid of this death, because little children are thrown
into graves alive. Goodbye forever.
I kiss you.
10.
Come with me, Anne.
Come,
it is awful not to be anywhere at all,
to have no one
like an old whore,
a general.
Come sit with me here
kiss me; my heart too is wounded
with forgiveness.
There is an end now.
Stay.
Your foot hooked through mine
your hand against my hand
your hip touching me lightly
it will end now
it will not begin again
Stay
they will pass
and not know us
the cold brute earth
is asleep
there is no danger
there is nothing
Anne
there is nothing
Even If I Could
Except for the little girl
making faces behind me, and the rainbow
behind her, and the school and the truck,
the only thing between you
and infinity
is me. Which is why you cover your ears
when I speak and why
you’re always oozing around the edges,
clinging, trying
to go by me.
And except for my eyes and the back
of my skull, and then my hair,
the wall, the concrete
and the fire-cloud, except for them
you would see
God. And that’s why rage howls in your arms
like a baby and why I can’t move —
because of the thunder and the shadows
merging like oil and the smile gleaming
through the petals.
Let me tell you how sick with loneliness
I am. What can I do while the distance
throbs on my back like a hump,
or say, with stars stinging me
through the wheel? You are before me,
behind me things rattle their deaths out
like paper. The angels ride
in their soft saddles:
except for them, I would come closer
and go.
Saint Sex
there are people whose sex
keeps growing even when they’re old whose
genitals swell like tumors endlessly
until they are all sex and nothing else nothing
that moves or thinks nothing
but great inward and outward handfuls of gristle
think of them men
who ooze their penises out like snail
feet whose testicles clang in their scrotums women