C
c.k. Williams 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.
C. K. Williams
The Singing
Farrar, Straus And Giroux
C.K. Williams
Elms | The Dream | War | Peace | The Shade
C.K. Williams, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1936, "... but one's first birth is rather boring or at least ordinary, isn't it? Even to oneself? I prefer to think of having had several comings into the world: maybe the first real one was the dusk when I was seven or so and first breathed the scent of trees and new grass and realized what a sensuous place the world was. Certainly another would be when I wrote my first poem..." he has said. C.K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing, which won The National Book Award in 2003; Repair (also from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). Williams has also published a memoir: Misgivings (2000) and a book of essays: Poetry and Consciousness; plus five works of translation: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling (Poems from Issa, 1983); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978). Among his many other awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Williams spends part of the year in Paris and teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.
C.K. Williams's compelling poetry is often characterized by long meditative lines which engage the reader in a moral awareness of relationships within society and between the self and other. His poetry often possesses a disarming immediacy -establishing an intimate rapport with the reader's psyche. The poems are deeply thoughtful and thought provoking. Williams has said, "My poems have a double function for me: they are about consciousness, in a more or less direct way, and they're involved just as much with the social, moral world with which my consciousness is necessarily concerned." When interviewed onthe PBS News Hour in November of 2003 upon winning the National Book Award for The Singing he said; "Poetry is part of the moral resonance of the world's urgency. It adds to the moral respository of the human conscience and is part of the existence of moral resonance in the world."
Cover art for Repair by Jed Mauger Williams. (c) 1999 by the artist. All rights reserved.
Sample poems of C.K Williams follow here by permission of the author.
Copyright © 1994-- 2003 by C.K. Williams, Farrar Straus & Giroux: NY. All rights reserved.
Elms
All morning the tree men have been taking down the stricken elms skirting
the broad sidewalks.
The pitiless electric chain saw whine tirelessly up and down their pierc-
ing, peratic scales
and the diesel choppers in the street shredding the debris chug feverishly,
incessantly,
packing trukload after truckload with the feathery, homogenized, inert
remains of heartwood,
twig and leaf and soon the black is stripped, it is as though illusions of
reality were stripped:
the rows of naken facing buildings stare and think, their divagations more
urgent than they were.
"The Winds of time," they think, the mystery charged with fearful clarity:
"The winds of time…"
All afternoon, on to the unhealing evening, minds racing, "Insolent,
unconscionable, the winds of time…"
The Dream
How well I have repressed the dram of death I had after the war when
I was nine in Newark.
It would be nineteen forty-six; my older best friend tells me what the
atom bomb will do,
consume me from within, with fire, and that night, as I sat, bolt awake,
in agony, it did:
I felt my stomach flare and flame, the edges of my heart curl up and
char like burning paper.
All there was was waiting for the end, all there was was sadness, for in
that awful dark,
that roar that never ebbed, that frenzied inward fire, I knew that everyone
I loved was dead,
I knew that consciousness itself was dead, the universe shucked clean of
mind as I was of my innards.
All the earth around me heaved and pulsed and sobbed; the orient and
immortal air was ash.
War
Jed is breathlessly, deliriously happy because he's just been deftly am-
bushed amd gimmed down
by his friend Ha Woei as he came charging headlong around the corner
of some bushes in the bois.
He slumps dramatically to the ground, disregarding the damp, black
gritty dirt he falls into,
and holds the posture of a dead man, forehead to the earth, arms and
legs thrown full-length east and west,
until it's time for him to rise and Ha Woei to die, which Ha Woei does
with vigor and abandon,
flinging himself down, the imaginary rifle catapulted from hnhis hand like
Capa's Spanish soldeir's.
Dinnertime, bath time, bedtime, story time, bam, bambambam, bam--
Akhilleus and Hektor.
Not until the cloak of night falls do they give themselves to the truces
nd forgivenesses of sleep.
Peace
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
even knows how what about,
what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another's
craws like fishbones,
the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to
bed, and through the night,
feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touch-
ing, back to back,
the blanket bridged across us for the wintery air to tunnel down, to keep
us lifting, turning,
through the angry dark that holds us int he cup of pain, the aching dark,
the weary dark,
then, tow3ard dawn, I can't help it, though justice won't I know be served,
I pull her to me,
and with such accurate, gradeful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive
embracing our entire lengths.
The Shade
A summer cold. No rash. No fever. Nothing. But a dozen times during
the night I wake
to listen to my son whimpering in his sleep, trying to snort the sticky
phlegm out of his nostrils.
The passage clears, silence, nothing. I cross the room, groping for the
warm,
elusive creature of his breath and my heart lunges, stutters, tries to race
away;
I don't know from what, from my imagination, from life itself, maybe
from understanding too well
and being unable to do anything about how much of my anxiety is always
for myself.
Whatever it was, I left it when the dawn came. There's a park near here
where everyone who's out of work in Qur neighborhood comes to line
up in the morning.
The converted school buses shuffling hands to the cannery fields in Jersey
w;ere just raffling away when I got there
and the small-time contractors, hiring out cheap walls, cheap ditches,
cheap everything,
were loading laborers onto the sacks of plaster and concrete in the backs
of their pickups.
A few housewives drove by looking for someone to babysit or clean cellars
for them,
then the gates of the local bar unlaced and whoever was left drifted in
out of the wall of heat
already rolling in with the first fists of smoke from the city incinerators
.It's so quiet now, I can hear the sparrows foraging scraps of garbage on
the paths.
The stove husk chained as a sign to the store across the street creaks in
the last breeze of darkness.
By noon, you'd have to be out of your mind to want to be here: the park
will reek of urine,
bodies will be sprawled on the benches, men will wrestle through the
surf of broken bottles,
but even now, watching the leaves of the elms softly lifting toward the
day, softly falling back,
all I see is fear forgivng fear on every page I turn; all I knokw is every
time I try to change it,
I say it again: my wife, my child…my home, my work, my sorrow.
If this were the last morning of the world, if time ahd finally moved
inside us and erupted
and we were Agamemnon again, Helen again, back on that faint, be-
ginning planet
where even the daily survivals were giants, filled with light, I think I’d
still be here,
afraid or not enough afraid, silently howling the names of death over the
grass and asphalt.
The morning goes on, the sun burning, the earth burning, and between
them, part of me lifts and starts back,
past the wash of dead music from the bar, the drinker reeling on the
curb, the cars coughing alive,
and part, buried in itself, stays, forever, blinking into the glare, freezing.
Copyright © 1994-- 2003 C.K. Williams. All rights, including electronic, reserved by the author.
Printed here by permission of the author from the various collections named above.
The Glance
by C. K. Williams
Distance, detachment,
then, like lenses clicking
together at last in alignment,
the socketing, sprocketing,
then always, like flame
in a cave, sympathy first,
then perhaps fear, perhaps
for no reason something
like rage but always
this desire to parse, scan,
solve, these sensitive bits
of cosmos streaming
towards me like filings
to magnets, one then another,
no longer question nor
quandary, flown only,
only flown fleeting past
like waste light yet
not wasted, not sundered
or squandered, singular rather,
sacred, each with its own
awareness, each taken
for its time and taking
and let go, relinquished,
yet still held in its instant:
not waste light, light!
Copyright © C. K. Williams
"STILL LIFE" C.K. Williams, from TAR
All we do -- how old are we? I must be twelve, she a little older; thirteen, fourteen -- is hold hands
and wander out behind a barn, past a rusty hay rake, a half-collapsed Model T,
then down across a barbed-wire grated pasture -- early emerald ryegrass, sumac in the dip --
to where a brook, high with run-off from a morning storm, broadened and spilled over --
turgid, muddy, viscous, snagged here and there with shattered branches -- in a bottom meadow.
I don't know then that the place, a mile from anywhere, and day, brilliant, sultry, balmy,
are intensifying everything I feel, but I know that what made simply touching her
almost a consummation was as much the light, the sullen surge of water through the grass,
the coils of scent, half hers -- the unfamiliar perspiration, talc, something else I'll never place --
and half the air's: mown hay somewhere, crushed clover underfoot, the brook, the breeze.
I breathe it still, that breeze, and, not knowing how I know for certain that it's that,
although it is, I know, exactly that, I drag it in and drive it -- rich, delicious,
as biting as wet tin -- down, my mind casting up flickers to fit it -- another field, a hollow --
and now her face, even it, frail and fine, comes momentarily to focus, and her hand,
intricate and slim, the surprising firmness of her clasp, how judiciously it meshes mine.
All we do -- how long does it last? an hour or two, not even one whole afternoon:
I'll never see her after that, and strangely (strange even now), not mind, as though,
in that afternoon the revelations weren't only the promise of flesh, but of resignation --
all we do is trail along beside the stream until it narrows, find the one-log bridge
and cross into the forest on the other side: silent foothills, a crest, a lip.
I don't know then how much someday -- today -- I'll need it all, how much want to hold it,
and, not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so emphatically and yet elude us,
not have it, not the way I would, not the way I want to have that day, that light,
the motes that would have risen from the stack of straw we leaned on for a moment,
the tempered warmth of air which so precisely seemed the coefficient of my fearful ardor,
not, after all, even the objective place, those shifting paths I can't really follow now
but only can compile from how many other ambles into other woods, other stoppings in a glade --
(for a while we were lost, and frightened; night was just beyond the hills; we circled back) --
even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so much imagination,
a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with little hope, to tear away.
Poems by CK Williams
Saturday November 22, 2003
The Guardian
Self-portrait with Rembrandt Self-portrait
I put my face inches from his
and look into his eyes
which look back,
but whatever it is
so much beyond suffering
I long towards in his gaze
and imagine inhabiting mine
eludes me.
I put my face inches from his
face palette-knifed nearly raw,
scraped down to whatever it is
that denies flesh yet is flesh
but whatever it is
which still so exalts flesh,
even flesh scraped nearly raw,
eludes me.
My face inches from his
face neither frowning
nor smiling nor susceptible
any longer to any expression
but this watch, this regard;
whatever it is
I might keep of any of that
eludes me.
My face inches from his,
his inches from mine,
whatever it is beyond
dying and fear of dying,
whatever it is beyond solace
which remains solace
eludes me,
yet no longer eludes me.
Leaves
A pair of red leaves spinning on one another
in such wildly erratic patterns over a frozen field
it's hard to tell one from another and whether
if they were creatures they'd be in combat or courting
or just exalting in the tremendousness of their being.
Humans can be like that, capricious, aswirl,
not often enough in exalting, but courting, yes,
and combat; so often in combat, in rancour, in rage,
we rarely even remember what error or lie
set off this phase of our seeming to have to slaughter.
Not leaves then, which after all in their season
give themselves to the hammer of winter,
become sludge, become muck, become mulch,
while we, still seething, broiling, stay as we are,
vexation and violence, ax, atom, despair.
· From The Singing , by CK Williams, published by Bloodaxe.
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