Authors: C. K. Williams
to float in brothers and sisters I’ll need
your engines and computers I’ll need four tall buildings
and heaters and strong-bulldozers with
thick treads and switches and there must be
uniforms
there must be maps and hoses and
tiled rooms to drain the blood off
and will your voices
come telling me you love me? and your mouths
and hands? and your cold
music? every inch of me? every
hour of me?
After That
Do you know how much pain is left
in the world? One tiny bit of pain is left,
braised on one cell like a toothmark.
And how many sorrows there still are? Three sorrows:
the last, the next to the last and this one.
And there is one promise left, feeling
its way through the poison, and one house
and one gun and one shout of agony
that wanders in the lost cities and the lost mountains.
And so this morning, suffering the third sorrow
from the last, feeling pain in my last gene,
cracks in the struts, bubbles in the nitro,
this morning for someone I’m not even sure exists
I waste tears. I count down by fractions
through the ash. I howl. I use everything up.
Ten Below
It is bad enough crying for children
suffering neglect and starvation in our world
without having on a day like this
to see an old cart horse covered with foam,
quivering so hard that when he stops
the wheels still rock slowly in place
like gears in an engine.
A man will do that, shiver where he stands,
frozen with false starts,
just staring,
but with a man you can take his arm,
talk him out of it, lead him away.
What do you do when both hands
and your voice are simply goads?
When the eyes you solace see space,
the wall behind you, the wisp of grass
pushing up through the curb at your feet?
I have thought that all the animals
we kill and maim, if they wanted to
could stare us down, wither us
and turn us to smoke with their glances —
they forbear because they pity us,
like angels, and love of something else
is why they suffer us and submit.
But this is Pine Street, Philadelphia, 1965.
You don’t believe
in anything divine being here.
There is an old plug with a worn blanket
thrown on its haunches. There is a wagon
full of junk — pipes and rotted sinks,
the grates from furnaces — and there
is a child walking beside the horse
with sugar, and the mammoth head lowering,
delicately nibbling from those vulnerable
fingers. You can’t cut your heart out.
Sometimes, just what is, is enough.
Tails
there was this lady once she used to grow
snakes in her lap
they came up like tulips
from her underpants and the tops
of her stockings and she’d get us
with candy and have us pet
the damned things
god they were horrible skinned
snakes all dead
it turned out she’d catch
them in the garden and skin
them and drive
knitting needles up along the spines
and sew them on
it stank
the skins rotting in the corner heads
scattered all over the floor
it turned out she loved
children she wanted
to do something
for us we ate
the candy of course we touched
the snakes we
hung around god
we hated her she was
terrible
Sky, Water
for Bruce and Fox McGrew
They can be fists punching the water —
muskrats, their whole bodies plunging
through weak reeds from the bank,
or the heads of black and white ducks
that usually flicker in quietly
and come up pointing heavenwards.
A man can lie off the brown scum of a slough
and watch how they’ll go in like blades,
deeply, to the bottom,
and in his pale silence
with the long field furrows strumming
like distant music,
he will wonder at and pity
the creatures hooked together like flowers on the water,
who will die flashing in the air,
shaken in the beak of sunlight.
The surface tainted with small blood,
there can be bees and water hydra,
sea-grasses and blown seed,
and before a man’s eyes life and death,
silence and the dim scream of love
can rise and furl up
from the bottom like smoke
and thin away.
Downwards
This is the last day of the world. On the river docks
I watch for the last time the tide get higher
and chop in under the stinking pilings. How the small creatures
who drift dreaming of hands and lungs must sting,
rotting alive in the waste spill, coming up dead
with puffy stomachs paler than the sky or faces.
There is deep fire fuming ash to the surface.
It is the last tide and the last evening and from now
things will strive back downwards.
A fish thrown up will gasp in the flare
and flop back hopelessly through the mud flats to the water.
The last man, an empty bottle with no message, is here, is me,
and I am rolling, fragile as a bubble in the upstream spin,
battered by carcasses, drawn down by the lips of weeds
to the terrible womb of torn tires and children’s plastic shoes
and pennies and urine. I am no more, and what is left,
baled softly with wire, floating
like a dark pillow in the hold of the brown ship, is nothing.
It dreams. Touching fangs delicately with cranes
and forklifts, it rests silently in its heavy ripening.
It stands still on the water, rocking, blinking.
Shells
It’s horrible, being run over by a bus
when all you are is a little box turtle.
You burst. Your head blasts out like a cork
and soars miles
to where the boy sprawls on the grass strip
beside the sidewalk. In mid-air
you are him. Your face touches his face,
you stutter, and you will go all your life
holding your breath,
wondering what you meant.
He forgets now
but he knew it in his cheek scorched
by the sweet blades and in his wild groin.
In his mother’s arms, screaming,
he knew it: that he was crossing
under the laughter and there was the other voice
sobbing, It’s not far, It’s not far.
Beyond
Some people,
they just don’t hate enough yet.
They back up, snarl, grab guns
but they’re like children,
they overreach themselves;
they end up standing there feeling stupid,
wondering if it’s worth it.
Some people, they don’t have a cause yet.
They just throw their hate here and there
and sooner or later it’s hollow
and they say, What is this?
and after that it’s too late.
After that you can barely
button your sleeve in the morning —
you just take breaths.
Some people are too tired to hate
and so they think, Why live?
They read the papers, wince,
but they’re hardly there anymore.
You go by them in the street
and they don’t spit or mutter —
they look at themselves in store windows,
they touch their faces.
Some people, you give up
on them. You let them go,
you lose them.
They were like children, they hardly
knew what they meant. You think to yourself,
Good Riddance.
Patience Is When You Stop Waiting
I stand on the first step under the torn mouths of hours
in a new suit. Terrified of the arched webs and the dust,
of my speech, my own hair slicked with its thin pride,
I jut like a thorn; I turn, my pain turns and closes.
Tell me again about silence. Tell me I won’t,
not ever, hear the cold men whispering in my pores
or the mothers and fathers who scream in the bedroom
and throw boxes of money between them and kiss.
At the window, faces hover against the soft glow
like names. If I cry out, it will forget me and go;
if I don’t, nothing begins again. Tell me
about mercy again, how she rides in eternity’s arms
in the drifts and the dreams come. The night is dying.
Wisely it thinks of death as a thing born of desire.
Gently it opens its sharp ribs and bites through
and holds me. Tell me about my life again, where it is now.
Faint Praise
for Jim Moss, 1935–1961
Whatever last slump of flesh
rolls like a tongue in the mouth of your grave,
whatever thin rags of your underwear
are melting in slow, tiny stomachs,
I am still here; I have survived.
I thought when you died that your angels,
stern, dangerous bats with cameras and laws,
would swarm like bees
and that the silences flaming from you
would fuse me like stone.
There were no new landscapes I could prepare for you.
I let you go.
And tonight, again, I will eat, read,
and my wife and I will move into love
in the swells of each other like ships.
The loose aerial outside will snap,
the traffic lights blink and change,
the dried lives of autumn crackle like cellophane.
And I will have my life still.
In the darkness, it will lie over against me,
it will whisper, and somehow,
after everything, open to me again.
Halves
I am going to rip myself down the middle into two pieces
because there is something in me that is neither
the right half nor the left half nor between them.
It is what I see when I close my eyes, and what I see.
As in this room there is something neither ceiling
nor floor, not space, light, heat or even
the deep skies of pictures, but something that beats softly
against others when they’re here and others not here,
that leans on me like a woman,
curls up in my lap and walks
with me to the kitchen or out of the house altogether
to the street — I don’t feel it, but it beats and beats;
so my life: there is this, neither before me
nor after, not up, down, backwards nor forwards from me.
It is like the dense, sensory petals in a breast
that sway and touch back. It is like the mouth of a season,
the cool speculations bricks murmur, the shriek in orange,
and though it is neither true nor false, it tells me
that it is quietly here, and, like a creature, is in pain;
that when I ripen it will crack open the locks, it will love me.
Penance
I only regret the days wasted in no pain.
I am sorry for having touched bottom
and loved again.
I am sorry for the torn sidewalks
and the ecstasy underneath, for the cars,
the old flower-lady watching her fingers,
my one shoe in the morning
with death on its tongue.
In the next yard a dog whines
and whines for his lost master
and for the children who have gone
without him. I am sorry
because his teeth click on my neck,
because my chest shudders and the owl cries
in the tug of its fierce sacrament.
I repent God and children,
the white talons of peace and my jubilance.
Everything wheels
in the iron rain, smiling and lying.
Forgive me, please.
It Is Teeming
In rain like this what you want is an open barn door
to look out from. You want to see the deep hoofprints
in the yard fill and overflow, to smell the hay and hear
the stock chewing and stamping and their droppings pattering.
Of course the messengers would come away. A wet mutt,
his underlip still crisp with last night’s chicken blood,
will drift through the gate and whine and nuzzle
your knee with a bad look like a secret drinker,
and you will wish for the lions, the claws that erected
and slashed back, because you are tired of lording it,
of caving ribs in, of swinging axes and firing.
Where are the angels with trucks who pulled the trees down?
Now it is pure muck, half cowshit, half mud and blood, seething.
You have to go out back, dragging it, of course. No one
sees you with it. The rain — you throw wakes up like a giant.
The way you wanted it, the way it would be, of course.
From Now On
for Murray Dessner
this knowledge so innocently it goes this sin
it dies without looking back it ripens
and dissolves and behind it behind
january behind bread and trenches there
are rooms with no gods in them there are breasts
with no deaths anymore and no promises
I knew mercy would leave me and turn
back I knew things in their small nests would
want me and say Come and things blossoming
say Go Downwards but still am I no bigger
than one man? not a pint more? a
watt? a filament of pity or sweetness? I turn
over first one side heads and then tails
I love life first then death first I
close I open I split down like an amoeba
into bricks and sunrise and longing