Collected Poems (57 page)

Perhaps it isn’t as we like to think, the last resort, the end of something

Pissing out the door of a cottage

Please try to understand, it was only one small moment, it didn’t mean a

Possibly because she’s already so striking — tall, well dressed, very clear

probably death fits all right in the world

Rather die than live through dying with it: rather perish absolutely now

Remember me? I was the one

right off we started inflicting history

Saddening, worse, to read in “Frost at Midnight,”

Seven hundred tons per inch, I read, is the force in a bomb or shell in

Shabby, tweedy, academic, he was old enough to be her father and I

She answers the bothersome telephone, takes the message, forgets the

She began to think that jealousy was only an excuse, a front, for some-

She could tell immediately, she said, that he was Jewish, although he

She keeps taking poses as they eat so that her cool glance goes off at

Shells of fearful insensitivity that I keep having to disadhere from my

She’s magnificent, as we imagine women must be

She was fourteen and a half; she’d hanged herself: how had she ever

She would speak of “our relationship” as though it were a thing apart

Slate scraps, split stone, third hand splintering timber; rusted nails and

Snapshots of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are scattered on

somebody keeps track of how many times

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were com-

Somehow a light plane

Someone has folded a coat under the boy’s head, someone else, an Arab

Some people

something to dip myself into

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying

“Sometimes I feel as though all I really want is to take his little whizzer

Sometimes she’d begin to sing to herself before she was out of bed

So much crap in my head

So often and with such cruel fascination I have dreamed the implacable

So quickly, and so slowly … In the tiny elevator of the flat you’d bor-

Special: Big Tits,
says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our

Splendid that I’d revel even more in the butterflies harvesting pollen

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar

Stalled an hour beside a row of abandoned, graffiti-stricken factories

Strange that one’s deepest split from oneself

Strange that sexual jealousy should be so much like sex itself: the same

Such longing, such urging, such warmth towards, such force towards, so

suppose I move a factory

“Tell me to touch your breast,” I wanted to say: “Please, please, please

That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a

That girl I didn’t love, then because she was going to leave me, loved

That moment when the high-wire walker suddenly begins to falter, wob-

That old documentary about the miners’ strike in Harlan County, the

That was the future I came back from

The almost deliciously ill, dank, dark algae on the stone of its sides

The book goes fluttering crazily through the space of my room towards

The bench he’s lying on isn’t nearly wide enough for the hefty bulk of

The boss, the crane operator, one of the workers, a friend of somebody in

The boy had badly malformed legs, and there was a long, fresh surgical

The bus that won’t arrive this freezing, bleak, pre-Sabbath afternoon

The cry of a woman making love in a room giving onto our hotel court-

The ever-consoling fantasy of my early adolescence was that one day

The father has given his year-old son
Le Monde
to play with in his

The first morning of mist after days of draining, unwavering heat along

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncer-

the goddamned animals might know more than we do about some things

the grandmas are all coming down like f-101’s like gulls

The just-fledged baby owl a waiter has captured under a tree near the

The last party before I left was in an old, run-down apartment house

The lesbian couple’s lovely toddler daughter has one pierced ear with a

the little children have been fighting

the lonely people are marching

The man who owns sleep

The Maya-Quechua Indians plodding to market on feet as flat and tough

The men working on the building going up here have got these great

The middle of the night, she’s wide awake, carefully lying as far away as

The morning is so gray that the grass is gray and the side of the white

The mummified spider hung in its own web in the rafters striped legs

The name of the horse of my friend’s friend

the nations have used up their desire

the not want

The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in love with some-

the only way it makes sense

… The part where he’s telling himself at last the no longer deniable

the pillows are going insane

The plaster had been burnt from the studs, the two-by-four joists were

the president of my country his face flushed

there are people whose sex

There hasn’t been any rain

There is a world somewhere else that is unendurable

there’s no no like money’s

there’s no such thing as death everybody

there’s somebody who’s dying

There was absolutely no reason after the centaur had pawed her and

There was nothing I could have done —

there was this lady once she used to grow

“There were two of them but nobody knew at first because only one hap-

There will always be an issue: doctrine, dogma, differences of con-

The science-fiction movie on the telly in which the world, threatened by

These things that came into my mind

The snow is falling in three directions at once against the sienna brick of

The space within me, within which I partly, or possibly mostly exist

The trouble with me is that whether I get love or not

The way, her father dead a day ago, the child goes in his closet, finds her-

The way, playing an instrument, when you botch a passage you have to

The way boxers postulate a feeling to label that with which they over-

The way it always feels like the early onset of an illness, the viral armies

The way she tells it, they were in the Alps or somewhere, tall, snow-

The way someone stays home, that’s all, stays in the house, in the room

The way these days she dresses with more attention to go out to pass the

The way the voice always, always gives it away, even when you weren’t

the way we get under cars and in

The way you’d renovate a ruined house, keeping the “shell,” as we call it

The whole lower panel of the chain-link fence girdling my old grammar

The whole time I’ve been walking down the block the public phone at

… The word alone sizzles like boiling acid, moans like molten lead

The world’s greatest tricycle-rider

They are pounded into the earth

They can be fists punching the water —

They drift unobtrusively into the dream, they linger, then they depart

They hunted lions, they hunted humans, and enslaved them

The young girl jogging in mittens and skimpy gym shorts through a

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so

They’re discussing the political situation they’ve been watching evolve in

They’re not quite overdressed, just a bit attentively, flashily for seventy-

They were so exceptionally well got-up for an ordinary Sunday afternoon

This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness

This is a story. You don’t have to think about it, it’s make-believe

This is before I’d read Nietzsche. Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even

this is fresh meat right mr nixon

This is the last day of the world. On the river docks

this knowledge so innocently it goes this sin

this poem is an onion

This time the holdup man didn’t know a video-sound camera hidden up

Though he’s sitting at the restaurant bar next to the most startlingly

Though no shyer than the others — while her pitch is being checked she

Though she’s seventy-four, has three children, five grown grandchildren

Three women old as angels

Time for my break; I’m walking from my study down the long hallway

Tugging with cocked thumbs at the straps of her old overalls the way

Two actors are awkwardly muscling a coffin out of a doorway draped in

Two maintenance men need half the morning probing just to find the

Uncanny to realize one was
here,
so much

Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that

Usually a large-caliber, dull-black, stockless machine gun hangs from a

Usually I don’t mind that being out of the city now

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa!
the butcher we used to patronize in the

Violence in the dream, violation of body and spirit; torment, mutilation

Vivaldi’s
Stabat

“Water” was her answer and I fell instantly and I knew self-destructively

We’d wanted to make France

We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who

we got rid of the big people

Well here I

What could be more endearing, on a long, too quiet, lonely evening in

Whatever last slump of flesh

Whatever poison it had ingested or injury incurred had flung it in agony

Whatever the argument the young sailor on the train is having and

what if the revolution comes and I’m in it and my job

What is there which so approaches an art form in its stubborn patience

What was going through me at that time of childhood

what we need is one of those gods

When I offered to help her and took the arm

When I saw my son’s heart blown up in bland black and white on the

When I was about eight, I once stabbed somebody, another kid, a little

when I was sleeping this morning one of my feet

when jessie’s fever went up god got farther away so he could see better

When one of my oldest and dearest friends died and another friend

When she’s not looking in his eyes, she looks down at his lips, his chin

When she stopped by, just passing, on her way back from picking up the

When the ponies are let out at dusk, they pound across their pasture

When we finally tracked him down, the old man (not really all that very

Where is it where is it where is it in what volume what text what treatise

Where no question possibly remains — someone crying, someone dead —

Wherever Jessie and her friend Maura alight, clouds of young men sud-

which is worse the lieutenant raising his rifle

Why is he wearing a white confirmation suit — he’s only about three — on

Why this much fascination with you, little loves, why this what feels like

Willa Selenfriend likes Paul Peterzell better than she likes me and I am

With his shopping cart, his bags of booty and his wine, I’d always found

with huge jowls that wobble with sad o

Without quite knowing it, you sit looking for your past or future in the

Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, when the blue-haired lady in the doctor’s

You give no hint how shy you really are, so thoroughly your warm and

“You make me sick!” this, with rancor, vehemence, disgust — again, “You

You must never repeat this to
him,
but when I started seeing my guru was

your list of victims dear

ALSO BY C. K. WILLIAMS

POETRY

A Day for Anne Frank

Lies

I Am the Bitter Name

The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa)

With Ignorance

Tar

Flesh and Blood

Poems 1963–1983

Helen

A Dream of Mind

Selected Poems

The Vigil

Repair

Love About Love

The Singing

ESSAYS

Poetry and Consciousness

MEMOIR

Misgivings

TRANSLATIONS

Sophocles’ Women of Trachis
(with Gregory Dickerson)

The Bacchae of Euripides

Canvas,
by Adam Zagajewski (translated with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry)

Selected Poems of Francis Ponge
(with John Montague and Margaret Guiton)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 2006 by C. K. Williams

All rights reserved

Published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 2007

Some of the new poems in this volume originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications:
Agni Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Bat City, Faultline, The New Yorker, Nightsun, Ontario Review, Poetry, Poetry Now
(UK),
Slate, The Threepenny Review, Tikken,
and
VanGogh’s Ear.
All of the new poems appeared in a limited-edition chapbook,
Creatures
(Haverford, PA: Green Shade, 2006).

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-53099-0