The following poem for William Carlos Williams
was written in response to the news
that he had died last spring.
And written just before he was given
the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
And for some people who read Williams,
they'll see various things that I'm
doing here in response to certain things
that Williams has taught about poetry.
"Language lifted out of the ordinary
into the illumination of poetry.
Objects, sticks and stones coming together you
place before our eyes.
Expose bare to the weather, rained on,
and cracked dry in the sun.
A stick, a stone, a river cutting through clay,
a white barn in a field, a cat coiled on a box.
Words coming together, moving at one another,
traction for the tongue.
Look at that, American language shouting across the Potomac.
Ring coins over the river, open out Western states,
anywhere a man can hear his voice.
In the machines of Patterson, rattling 10 million words
a day, a voice moves physical not understood as literary.
But moving as a machine with traction,
fitting itself against resistance.
Song understood by the banging ear.
A sparrow balances in the wind, voicing song
into the shifting air.
It is a small thing, but big as all creation.
To its mate decided on the wire balancing.
The wind blows, the wire snaps underfoot,
the feet hold, the feathers have no time to compose themselves.
It is as it should be or as it is.
I heard he asked the excavators for a boulder dumped
in his front yard.
They must have thought he was some old nut.
I mean, you dig a boulder out of the ground,
you don't leave it in your front yard.
I mean, what good is a big rock?
All you can do is look at it or lean on it.
I mean if you've got a lawn, you've
got to mow around the damn thing,
and clip the bloody grass.
I mean, I hear he used to be a doctor.
What did he do with the gall stones he cut out?
Put them on the bloody mantel?
The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned,
I understand that.
Until the point of what now?
He is dead, gone forever.
And to where?
Into that black, which is blacker than the memory
of black.
It is as it should be or as it is.
He is a part of the history.
He brought poems together, clutched out of chaos.
He will be the reason behind a language, where
ethics can be clutched.
He will be sticks and stones fewer
of wood, drawer of wattle."
I revised this poem since I wrote it.
And I don't read the last three lines.