Authors: C. K. Williams
are still strange and comforting.
The pines outside, immobile
as chessmen, fume turps
that blend with the soap taste
of the sheets and with the rot
of camphor and old newspapers
in the bare bureau drawers.
Jarred by a headlight’s glare
from the country road, the crumbling
plaster swarms with shadows.
The bulb in the barn, dull
and eternal, sways and flickers
as though its long drool
of cobwebs had been touched,
and the house loosens, unmoors,
and, distending and shuddering, rocks
me until I fall asleep.
In December the mare
I learned to ride on died.
On the frozen paddock hill,
down, she moaned all night
before the mink farmers
came in their pickup
truck, sat on her dark
head and cut her throat.
I dream winter. Shutters
slamming apart. Bags
crammed with beer bottles
tipping against clapboard.
Owls in chimneys.
Drafts; thieves; snow.
Over the crusty fields
scraps of blue loveletters
mill wildly like children,
and a fat woman, her rough
stockings tattered away
at a knee, sprints in high,
lumbering bounds among
the skating papers. Out
to the road — red hydrant,
bus bench, asphalt —
a wasp twirling at her feet,
she is running back.
My first kiss was here.
I can remember the spot —
next to a path, to
a cabin, a garden patch —
but not how it happened
or what I felt, except
amazement that a kiss
could be soundless. Now,
propped on an elbow,
I smoke through the dawn, smudging
the gritty sheets with ash.
Day finally. The trees
and fences clarify, unsnarl.
Flagstones, coins, splash
across the driveway crowns
and the stark underbrush
animals go away.
A rickety screen door bangs,
slaps its own echo
twice. No footsteps
but someone is out sifting
ashes in the garbage pit.
Suddenly dishes jangle
the bright middle distances
and the heat begins again:
by now the ground must be
hard and untillable as ice.
Far off from the house,
the lake, jellied with umber
weed scum, tilts toward
the light like a tin tray.
Dead rowboats clog
the parched timber dam
and along the low banks
the mounds of water rubble
I gathered yesterday
have dried and shrunk down
to a weak path wobbling
back and forth from the edge.
The Other Side
Across the way hands
move nervously on curtains,
and behind them, radiated
with arc light, silver,
there is almost no face.
Almost no eyes look at me through this air.
Almost no mouth twists
and repeats, following my mouth, the shrill ciphers
that cross like swallows.
Tonight the breeze from the distillery
stinks of death. Do you think men have died
in the vats tonight? Everyone waits,
sick with the stench of mash
and spirits, and the tubs lick
their own sides with little splashes,
little bubbles that pop, clearing themselves.
In this breeze, it is strange to be telling myself,
Life, what are you saying?
In this breeze, almost like hands, words
climb on the thin gauze of curtains
and drop. Men float
from corner to corner, and, almost like hands,
birds put their sore wings under the eaves
and sleep.
Of What Is Past
I hook my fingers into the old tennis court fence
and kneel down in an overgrowth of sharp weeds
to watch the troopers in their spare compound drill.
Do you remember when this was a park? When girls
swung their rackets here in the hot summer mornings
and came at night to open their bodies to us?
Now gun-butts stamp the pale clay like hooves.
Hard boots gleam.
And still, children play tag and hide-and-seek
beyond the barriers. Lovers sag in the brush.
It’s not them, it’s us: we know too much.
Soon only the past will know what we know.
Ashes Ashes We All Fall Down
how come when grandpa is teaching the little boy
to sing he can’t no matter what remember even
though he taps time hard with his teeth like a cricket even
though he digs in hard with his fingers how come?
and when he grows tall he will name everyone
he meets father or mother but will still have no songs
he leans back among the cold pages he falls down
in the palace of no sleep where the king cries and
in the new country the musical soldiers will
beat him he will sell silver consonants out
of his car the lady will cup his dry testicles
in the drone the soldiers beat him again
I miss you now can you
remember the words at least? and the
new name? when pain comes
you must kill it when beauty comes
with her smiles you must kill them I
miss you again I miss you white
bug I miss you sorrow rain radio I miss
you old woman in my bible in the dream
Trappers
In the dark with an old song
I sit, in the silence,
and it knows me
by heart and comes faltering
gently through me
like a girl in love,
in a room, evening,
feeling her way.
When mountain men
were snowed in for months
in the Rockies, sleet
hissing over the sharp crust
to hollow places, branches
groaning through the night,
they must have done what I do
now, and been as terrified.
I let a word out,
and what comes, an awful drone,
a scab, bubbles up
and drills away unfadingly.
Later, in a place far
from here, feeling softly on her neck
like a fly, she will gaze
into the sunlight, and not see me.
Being Alone
Never on one single pore Eternity
have I been touched by your snows
or felt your shy mouth tremble,
your breath break on me
like the white wave. I have not felt
your nakedness tear me
with hunger or your silver hands
betray me but today I promise
whatever flower of your house
should bloom I will stay
locked to its breast.
Like little fish who live
harmlessly under the bellies of sharks,
I will go where you go,
drift inconspicuously
in the raw dredge of your power
like a leaf, a bubble of carrion,
a man who has understood and does not.
Trash
I am your garbage man. What you leave,
I keep for myself, burn or throw
on the dump or from scows in the delicious river.
Your old brown underpants are mine now,
I can tell from them
what your dreams were. I remember
how once in a closet with shoes
whispering and mothballs, you held on
and cried like a woman. Your nights stink
of putrid lampshades, of inkwells and silk
because my men and I with our trails
of urine and soft eggs and our long brooms
hissing, came close.
What do they do with kidneys and toes
in hospitals? And where did your old dog go
who peed on the rug and growled?
They are at my house now, and what grinds
in your wife’s teeth while she sleeps
is mine. She is chewing
on embryos, on the eyes of your lover,
on your phone book and the empty glass
you left in the kitchen. And in your body,
the one who died there and rots
secretly in the fingers of your spirit,
she is hauling his genitals out, basket
after basket
and mangling all of it in the crusher.
Giving It Up
It is an age
of such bestial death
that even before we die
our ghosts go.
I have felt mine while I slept
send shoots over my face,
probing some future char
there, tasting the flesh
and the sweat
as though for the last time.
And I have felt him
extricate himself and go,
crying, softening himself
and matching his shape
to new bodies; merging,
sliding into souls,
into motors, buildings,
stop signs, policemen —
anything.
By morning, he is back.
Diminished, shorn
of his light, he lies crumpled
in my palm, shivering
under my breath like cellophane.
And every day
there is nothing to do
but swallow him like a cold
tear
and get on with it.
For Gail, When I Was Five
My soul is out back eating your soul.
I have you tied in threads like a spider
and I am drinking down your laughter
in huge spoonfuls. It is like tinsel.
It sprays over the crusty peach baskets
and the spades hung on pegs. It is like air
and you are screaming, or I am, and we are
in different places with wild animal faces.
What does God do to children who touch
in the darkness of their bodies and laugh?
What does he think of little underpants
that drift down on the hose like flowers?
God eats your soul, like me. He drinks
your laughter. It is God in the history
of my body who melts your laughter
and spits it in the wounds of my life like tears.
Don’t
I have been saying what I have to say
for years now, backwards and forwards
and upside down and you haven’t heard
it yet, so from now on
I’m going to start unsaying it:
I’m going to unsay what I’ve said already
and what everyone else has said
and what hasn’t even been said yet.
I’m going to unsay
the northern hemisphere
and the southern,
east and west, up
and down, the good
and the bad. I’m going to unsay
what floats just over my skin
and just under: the leaves
and the roots, the worm
in the river and the whole river
and the ocean and the ocean
under the ocean. Space
and light are going,
silence, sound, flags,
photographs, dollar bills:
the sewer people and the junk people,
the money people and the concrete people
who ride out of town on dreams
and love it, and the dreams,
even the one pounding
under the floor like a drum —
I’m going to run them all down
again the other way
and end at the bottom.
Do you see? Caesar is unsaid
now. Christ
is unsaid. They trade toys
but it’s too late.
The doctor is unsaid, cured;
the rubber sheet grows
leaves, luscious and dark,
and the patient feels them
gathering at the base
of his spine like a tail.
It is unsaid
that we have no tails —
an old lady twirls hers
and lifts
like a helicopter.
Time turns
backwards in its womb and floats out
in its unsaying.
It won’t start again.
The sad physicist
throws switches but all
the bomb does is sigh inwardly
and hatch like an egg,
and little void-creatures
come, who live
in the tones between notes,
innocent and unstruck.
A baby fighting for air
through her mother’s breast
won’t anymore: the air is unsaid.
The skeleton I lost in France
won’t matter. No picnics,
no flattened grass,
no bulls.
Everything washes up,
clean as morning.
My wife’s wet underwear in the sink —
I unsay them,
they swallow me
like a Valentine.
The icebox is growing baby green
lima beans for Malcolm Lowry.
The house fills with love.
I chew perfume
and my neighbor kissing me good morning
melts and goes out
like a light.
There is bare rock
between here and the end.
There is a burnt place
in the silence.
Along my ribs, dying of old age,
the last atom dances
like a little girl. I unsay
her yellow dress, her hair,
her slippers
but she keeps dancing,
jumping back and forth
from my face to my funny bone
until I burst out laughing.
And then I unsay
the end.
Just Right
the way we get under cars and in
motors you’d think we were made for them our hands
slotting in the carbs our feet
on the pedals and how everything
even flowers even the horns of cattle fits
just right it is like nail and hole
even apples even hand grenades with indentations
for our fingers and the detonations patterns finding us
all this given and how ungrateful we are
dreaming that someday we won’t touch anything
that all this space will close on us
the fire sprout through us and blossom and
the tides
dear father of the fire save me enough room please
and dear water-mother I’d like two clear drops