Authors: C. K. Williams
Only appalling now to comprehend that reality could be constructed of expediency, falsehood, self-lies;
only worth lamenting now when at last you might but hopelessly won’t, for so much else demands rectification.
Even our notions of beauty, even our modes of adornment; whence suspicion of one’s own sensual yearnings,
whence dejection, whence rage, all with such labor to be surmounted, while love waited, life waited; whence woe.
Whence woe,
and the voice far distant within crying out still of what was lost or despoiled.
And the cellular flares incessantly flashing, evil and good, yes, no; whence desolation, what never would be.
Sully: Sixteen Months
One more thing to keep:
my second grandson, just
pre-speech, tripping on a toy,
skidding, bump and yowl,
and tears, real tears,
coursing down his cheeks,
until Jessie, cooing, lifts
and holds him to her,
so it’s over, but as
they’re leaving for home,
he and I alone a moment
in the room where he fell,
he flops down again,
to show me, look,
how it came to pass,
this terrible thing, trilling
syllables for me, no
words yet, but notes,
with hurt in them, and cries,
and that greater cry
that lurks just behind:
right here, he’s saying,
on this spot precisely,
here
it happened, and yes,
I answer, yes, and so
have the chance to lift him
too, to hold him, light
and lithe, against me, too.
The World
Splendid that I’d revel even more in the butterflies harvesting pollen
from the lavender in my father-in-law’s garden in Normandy
when I bring to mind Francis Ponge’s poem where he transfigures them
to levitating matches, and the flowers they dip into to unwashed cups;
it doesn’t work with lavender, but still, so lovely, matches, cups,
and lovely, too, to be here in the fragrant summer sunlight reading.
Just now an essay in
Le Monde,
on Fragonard, his oval oil sketch
of a mother opening the bodice of her rosily blushing daughter
to demonstrate to a young artist that the girl would be suitable as a “model”;
the snide quotation marks insinuate she might be other than she seems,
but to me she seems entirely enchanting, even without her top
and with the painter’s cane casually lifting her skirt from her ankle.
Fragonard needs so little for his plot; the girl’s disarranged underslips
a few quick swirls, the mother’s compliant mouth a blur, her eyes
two dots of black, yet you can see how crucial this transaction is to her,
how accommodating she’d be in working through potential complications.
In the shadows behind, a smear of fabric spills from a drawer,
a symbol surely, though when one starts thinking symbol, what isn’t?
Each sprig of lavender lifting jauntily as its sated butterfly departs,
Catherine beneath the beech tree with her father and sisters, me watching,
everything and everyone might stand for something else,
be
something else.
Though in truth I can’t imagine what; reality has put itself so solidly before me
there’s little need for mystery … Except for us, for how we take the world
to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.
II
Of Childhood the Dark
Here
Uncanny to realize one was
here,
so much
came before the awareness of being here.
Then to suspect your place here was yours only
because no one else wanted or would have it.
A site, a setting, and you the matter to fill it,
though you guessed it could never be filled.
Therefore, as much as a presence, you were a problem,
a task; insoluble, so optional, so illicit.
Then the first understanding: that you
yourself were the difficult thing to be done.
Outsets
Even then, though surely I was a “child,”
which implied sense and intent, but no power,
I wasn’t what I’d learned a child should be:
I was never naïve, never without guile.
Hardly begun, I was no longer new,
already beset with quandaries and cries.
Was I a molten to harden and anneal, the core
of what I was destined to become, or was I
what I seemed, inconsequential, but free?
But if free, why quandaries, why cries?
Danger
Watch out, you might fall, as that one fell,
or fall
ill,
as he or she did, or die,
or worse, not die, be insufficient,
less than what should be your worth.
Be cautious of your body, which isn’t you,
though neither are you its precise other;
you’re what it feels, and the knowing
what’s felt, yet no longer quite either.
Your life is first of all what may be lost,
its ultimate end to not end.
And Fear
Not lurk, not rancor, not rage, nor,
please, trapping and tearing, yet they were
there,
from the start, impalpable but prodigious,
ever implicit. Even before anything happens,
(how know that this is what happens?)
there was the terror, the wrench and flex,
the being devoured, ingested by terror,
and the hideous inference, that from now
every absence of light would be terror,
every unheard whisper more terror.
The Lesson
One must be
right,
one’s truths must
be
true,
most importantly they,
and you, must be irrefutable, otherwise
they’ll lead to humiliation and sin.
Your truths will seek you, though you still
must construct and comprehend them,
then unflinchingly give yourself to them.
More than you, implying more even
than themselves, they are the single matter
for which you must be ready to lie.
The Ban
Always my awful eyes, and always
the alluring forbidden, always what I’d see
and the delirious behind or beneath; always
taboo twinned with intrigue, prohibition,
and the secret slits, which my gaze, with my assent
or without it, would slip skittering through.
Though nothing was ever as enchanting
as the anticipation of it, always my eyes
would be seeking again all they imagined,
lewd and low, might be hidden from them.
Pandora
It was clear, now that the story I’d waited
so long for had finally found me,
it was I who englobed the secrets, and the evil,
and the ruined splendor before evil,
for I guessed I’d once been in splendor.
Terrible to have coffered in myself these forebodings,
these atrocious closeds which must never
be opened, but are, ever will be.
Revealed now, though, ratified and released,
at least they were no longer just mine.
Games
The others play at violence, then so do I,
though I’d never have imagined
I’d enact this thing of attack,
of betraying, besting, rearing above,
of hand become fist, become bludgeon,
these similes of cruelty, conquest, extinction.
They, we, play at doing away with,
but also at being annulled, falling dead,
as though it were our choice, this learning
to be done away with, to fall dead.
Devout
I knew this couldn’t be me, knew this holy
double of me would be taken from me,
would go out to the ravenous rocks to be dust
beneath rock, glint ashudder in dust,
but I knew I’d miss him, my swimmer in the vast;
without him was only mind-gristle and void.
Disbelief didn’t drive him from me, nor the thrash
of austerities I gave him to think might be prayer.
Scorn, rather, for me, for my needing reasons to pray,
for the selves I tried to pray into being to pray.
Self-Love
No sooner had I heard of it, than I knew
I was despicably, inextricably guilty of it.
It wasn’t as I’d hoped that kingdom I’d found
in myself where you whispered to yourself
and heard whispers back: that was iniquity too,
but was nothing to this; from this, I could tell,
my inept repentances would never redeem me,
so I must never trust myself again,
not the artifice I showed others, still less
that seething, sinful boil within.
First Love Lost
The gash I inflict on myself in a sludge-slow
brook in a dip in field of hornets and thorns,
I hardly remark, nor the blood spooled out behind
like a carnivore’s track; it brings satisfaction,
as though I’d been tested, and prevailed. And the talon
of pain in my palm? I already know pain,
love’s pain, which I know is all pain, just as I know
the river will dry, my filthy wound heal
and the wolf be driven to earth, before love,
love everlasting, will relent or release me.
Sensitive
Sensitive on a hillside, sensitive in a dusk,
summer dusk of mown clover exhaling
its opulent languor; sensitive in a gush
of ambient intimation, then inspiration, these forms
not forms bewilderingly weaving towards,
then through me, calling me forth from myself,
from the imperatives which already so drove me:
fused to sense and sensation, to a logic
other than attainment’s, unknowns beckoned,
from beyond even the clover and dusk.
My Sadness
Not grounded in suffering, nor even
in death, mine or anyone else’s,
it was sufficient unto itself, death and pain
were only portions of its inescapable sway.
Nor in being alone, though loneliness contained
much of the world, and infected the rest.
Sadness was the rest; engrossed in it, rapt,
I thought it must be what was called soul.
Don’t souls, rapt in themselves, ravish themselves?
Wasn’t I rapt? Wasn’t I ravaged?
Tenses
Then seemingly all at once there was a
past,
of which you were more than incidentally composed.
Opaque, dense, delectable as oil paint,
fauceted from a source it itself generated in you,
you were magnified by it, but it could intrude,
and weigh, like an unfathomable obligation.
Everything ending waited there, which meant
much would never be done with, even yourself,
the memory of the thought of yourself you were now,
that thought seemingly always hardly begun.
III
Elegy for an Artist
for Bruce McGrew
Wichita, Kansas, 1937–Rancho Linda Vista, Arizona, 1999
1.
THE REHEARSAL
(
Months before
)
Vivaldi’s
Stabat
Mater,
an amateur
ensemble in a church,
the conductor casual
but competent enough,
the strings adequately
earnest so if they thump
a little or go sour,
that igniting passion’s
still there. The singer,
waiting, hugs herself,
as though the music
chilled her, then with a fierce
attack, a pure, precise
ecstatic lift above
the weavings of the rest,
she soars, and as I
often do these days,
I think of you, old friend
so far away, so ill,
of how I’d love to have
you listening with me,
though with every
passage you are with
me, always with me,
as music we cherish
is always with us, only
waiting to be ascended
to again, to confirm
again there’ll always
be these counterpoints
of memory and love,
unflawed by absence
or sorrow; this music
we hear, this other,
richer still, we are.
2.
WEPT
(
The day after
)
Never so
much
absence,
though, and not just absence,
never such a sense
of violated presence,
so much desolation,
so many desperate
last hopes refuted,
never such pure despair.
Surely I know by now
that each death demands
its own procedures
of mourning, but I can’t
find those I need even
to begin mourning you:
so much affectionate
accord there was with you,
that to imagine
being without you
is impossibly
diminishing; I relied
on you to ratify
me, to reflect
and sanction with your life
who I might be in mine.
So restorative you were,
so much a response:
untenable that
the part of me you shared
with me shouldn’t have you
actively a part of it.
Never so much absence,
so many longings ash,
as you are ash. Never
so cruel the cry within,
Will I never again
be with you?
Ash. Ash.
3.
WITH YOU
(
Months after
)
One more morning I want
with you, one last dawn
together on your porch,