C.K. Williams' books include Lies,
I Am the Bitter Name, With Ignorance, Tar, Flesh and Blood
which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Selected
Poems, A Dream of Mind, and this year The Vigil,
from which he will read tonight.
In 1990, his translation of Euripides' The Bacchae was
published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Among his honors he's received the Morton Dauwen Zabel
Award of the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award,
and the Harriet Monroe Rrize from Poetry magazine.
Tar came out when I was in graduate school.
And it was one of those rare books that's like wildfire
through the community.
I think what excited us most was that his long line and inclusive
sensibility said that anything could
be grist for the poetry mill.
That consciousness could be embodied in poetic form
with a greater authenticity than we had ever imagined.
Gertrude Stein once said that Picasso's gaze was so intense
that after he had looked at something,
she was surprised there was anything left in the room.
After reading Williams' new book, The Vigil,
I have the same feeling about his ability
to study a dramatic moment, an emotion, a blip on the screen
of domestic life, and transform it from mere incident
to a manifestation of resonant inner life.
In an article in APR --87, Williams
wrote these words which I have had posted
in my study for a decade now.
Emotions I hold are in and of themselves neither pure,
spontaneous, nor very clear.
They require a stringent attentiveness
and if the soul is to do justice to their turbulence and furor
without belittling itself, it must indeed be educated,
and rigorously so.
It is my thesis that the most useful method we have devised
for that education is poetry.
Please welcome C.K. Williams.
It's a pleasure to be back in Tucson.
First time I was in Tucson was with Bruce McGrew and Fox McGrew
in 1963 of all times.
That was before the world was really born.
The neighbor-- her five horrid, deformed,
little dogs who incessantly yap on the roof under my window;
her cats, God knows how many, who must piss on her rugs,
her landings, a sickening reek; her shadow once,
fumbling the chain on her door, then the door slamming fearfully
shut, only the barking and the music--
jazz-- filtering, as it does day and night, into the hall.
The time it was Chris Connor singing "Lush Life," how
it brought back my college sweetheart, my first real love,
who, till I left her, played the same record
and, head on my shoulder, hand on my thigh,
sang sweetly along of regrets and depletions
she was too young for, as I was too young,
later, to believe in her pain.
It startled, then bored, then repelled me.
My starting to fancy she'd ended up
in this fire trap in the Village,
that my neighbor was her, my thinking we'd
meet, recognize one another, become friends, that I'd
accomplish a penance.
My seeing her, it wasn't her, at the mailbox.
Gray yellow hair, army pants under a nightgown,
her turning away hiding her ravaged face in her hands
muttering an inappropriate hi.
Sometimes there are frightening goings
on in the stairwell, a man shouting shut up,
the dogs frantically snarling, all
claws scrabbling, then her her voice,
hoarse, harsh, hollow, almost only a tone, incoherent,
a note, a squawk, bone on metal, metal gone molten,
calling them back: come back darlings,
come back dear ones, my sweet angels, come back.
Medea, she was next time I saw her-- sorceress,
tranced, ecstatic, stuck still on the sidewalk, ragged coat
hanging agape, passerbys flowing around her, her mouth torn
suddenly open as though in a scream,
silently, though, as though only in her brain or breast
had it erupted, a cry so pure, practiced, detached, it
had no need of a voice or could no longer bear one.
These invisible links that allure these translations even
of anguish that hold us.
The girl, my old love, the last lost time
I saw her when she came to find me
at a party, her drunkenly stumbling, falling, sprawling,
skirt hiked, eyes veined red, swollen with tears--
her shame, her dishonor, my ignorant, arrogant coarseness,
my secret pride, my turning away.
Still life on a rooftop, dead trees in barrels,
a bench, broken, dogs, excrement, sky.
What pathways through pain?
What junctures of vulnerability?
What crossings, encounterings?
Too many lives in our lives already.
Too many chances for sorrow.
Too many unaccounted for pasts.
Behold me, the God of frenzied, inexhaustible love
says, rising in bloody splendor behold me.
Her making her way down the littered vestibule stairs
one agonized step at a time, my holding the door,
her crossing the fragmented tiles, faltering at the step
to the street, droning, not looking at me.
Can you help me?
Taking my arm, leaning lightly against me,
her wavering step into the world, her whispering,
"Thanks, love," lightly lightly against me.
That poem was published in the magazine
and a few weeks later, a week later,
a letter came to the magazine and on the envelope was written,
I'm the woman in the poem.
And of course we were worried about which woman,
it was my old college sweetheart.
She said, now I know you really loved me.
Dominion Depression I don't know what
day or year of their secret cycle
this blazing golden afternoon might be,
but out in the field in a shrub, hundreds of pairs of locusts
are locked in a slow sexual seizure.
Hardly more animate than the few leaves they haven't devoured,
they see like a single being, limbs, antennas and wings
all tangled together as intricately
as a layer of neurons.
Always the neat, tight, gazeless helmet,
the exoskeleton burnished like hardened glue,
always the abdomen twitched deftly under or aside
the skilled rider, the skillfully ridden.
One male, though, has somehow severed a leg.
It sways on the spike of a twig like a harp.
He lunges after his female, tilts, falls.
The mass horribly shudders, shifts, realigns.
So dense, so hard, so immersed in their terrible need
to endure, so unlike me but like me.
Why do they seem such a denial?
Why do I feel, if I plunged my hand in among them, I die?
This must be what God thinks, beholding
his ignorant obstinate libidinally maniacal
offspring, wanting to stop them, to keep them
from being so much an image of his impotence or his wit,
how divided he is from his creation.
Even here, near the end, he sees moving towards him
a smaller, sharper, still more gleaming something, extracting
moist matter from a skull.
No more now.
He waits.
fistful of that mute oily crackling crystalline broil,
then he feels at last the cool wing
beat of the innocent void moving in again over the world.
Instinct, although he's apparently
the youngest (his little Rasta beard is barely
down and feathers) most casually connected,
he hardly glances at the girl he's with.
She might be his wife, half sloshed--
or more than half--
on picnic whiskey teenaged father, when his little son--
two or so-- tumbles from the slide hard enough
to scare himself, hard enough to make him
cry, really cry, not partly cry, not
pretend the fright for what must be some scarce attention,
but really let it out, let loudly be
revealed the fear of having been so close to real fear.
He, the father, knows just how quickly
he should pick the child up, then
how firmly hold it, fit its head into the muscled socket
of his shoulder, rub its back, croon and whisper to it,
and finally pull away a little, about a heads length, looking,
still concerned, into its eyes.
Then smiling broadly, brightly, as though some [AUDIO OUT]
been shared, something of importance,
not dreadful or not very, not at least now
that it's passed, but rather something funny.
Funny, yes.
It was funny, wasn't it, to fall and cry like that.
Though one certainly can understand.
We've all had glimpses of a premonition of the anguish
out there.
You're better now, though, aren't you?
Why don't you go back and try again?
I'll watch you.
Maybe have another drink.
Yes, my son, my love.
I'll go back and be myself now.
You go be the person you are too.
That's all one sentence.
I felt as though I was reading it all in one breath.
Secrets.
I didn't know that the burly, old man who
lived in a small house like the block in Newark
was a high up in the mob on the docks until I was grown
and my father finally told me.
Neither did it enter my mind until too
much later that my superior that year at Neisner's, a dazzlingly
bright Black man, would never in those days
climb out of his mindless stockroom.
The councilman on the take, the girl upstairs
giving free oral sex, the loan sharks and addicts,
it was all news to me.
Do people hide things from me to protect me, do they mistrust me?
Even when Sid Mizraki was found beaten to death in an alley
I didn't hear until years later.
Sid murdered, God, my God, was all I could say.
Poor sad Sidney, poor hard luck Sid!
I hadn't known Sidney that long but I liked him:
plump, awkward, he was gentle, eager to please,
the way unprepossessing people will be.
We played ball, went to Chinatown with the guys.
He had a bleak life, childhood in the streets,
bad education, no women, irrelevant jobs.
In those days he worked for the city, then stopped.
I had no idea of his true tribulations.
As the tale finally found me Sid had
a boss who hated him, rode him, drove him insane,
and Sid one drunk night in a bar bribed
some burglars he knew to kill the creep for him.
I can't conceive how you dream up something like that
or how you'd know people like that but apparently Sid
had access to tax rolls and rich people's addresses
he was willing to trade.
Then suddenly he was transferred, got a friendlier
boss, forgot the whole witless affair, but a year or so later,
the thieves were caught and as part of their plea bargain
sold Sid.
He got off with probation but was
fired, of course and who'd hire him with that record.
He worked as a bartender, went on relief,
drifted got into drugs, some small time dealing then he
married the plainest woman on Earth someone told me,
but soon was divorced, more drugs, more dealing,
runs in with cops, then his unthinkable
Cavalry in that alley.
It was never established who did it or why; no one but me
was surprised it had happened.
A bum found him bleeding, broken, inert.
A friend from before said his torments are over.
Well Sid what now?
Shall I sing for you, celebrate some truth?
Here's truth: add up what you didn't know, friend,
and I don't, and you might have one conscious person.
No, this has nothing to do with your omissions or sins or failed
rectifications but mine: to come so close to a life
and not comprehend it, acknowledge
it, truly know it is life.
How can I feel so clearly the shudder
of blows, even the blessed oblivion breaking on you,
and not really grasp what you were in yourself, to yourself?
What secrets sustained you?
So for once I know something: that if anyone's soul should
be singing, Sidney, it's yours.
Poor poet, you tell me, poor sheltered creature:
if you can't open your eyes at least stay still.
It is true that thing about--
some people-- I was talking with somebody
about that the other day and something had
been hidden from me again and it was something rather unpleasant.
And I said, well, maybe it's not so bad to have
some things hidden from you.
But I don't quite know why it happens to me.
This is a poem about the death of my mother
for the death of my mother.
My mother died two years ago.
It's called "Grief."
Gone now after the days of desperate unconscious gasping,
the reflexive staying alive, tumorous lungs.
tumorous blood, ruined, tumorous liver demanding
to live, to go on, even the innocent bladder,
its tense dull golden coin in the slack translucent bag.
Gone now after the months of scanning, medication, nausea,
hair loss and weight loss, remission, partial remission,
gratitude, hope, lost hope, anxiety, anger, confusion,
the hours and days of everyday life something like life
but only as dying is like life.
Gone the quiet at the end of dying,
the mouth caught agape on its last bite
at a breath, bare skull with its baby
like growth of new hair thrown back
to open the terrified larynx.
The flesh given way but still of the world,
lost but still in the world with the living, my hand on her face,
on her brow, the sphere of her skull, her arm
so thin, so wasted, gone, yet of us and with us,
a person, not yet mere dream or imagination, then
gone wholly under the Earth, cold Earth, cold grasses,
cold winter wind, freezing eternity, cold forever.
Is this grief?
Tears took me, then seized.
The wish to die, too, may have fled through me,
but not more than with any moment's despair,
the old surging wish to be freed, finished.
I feel pain, pain for her, pain for her
having to know she was going, that we must,
pain for the pain of my daughter and son,
for my wife, whose despair for her own mother returned,
pain for all human beings who know they will go and still go
as though they knew nothing, even pain for myself,
my intention, my fear of stories never begun, now never ending.
But, still, is this grief, waking too early,
tiring too quickly, distracted, impatient, abrupt,
but still waking, still thinking and working?
Is this what grief is?
Is this sorrow enough?
I go to the mirror.
Someone who might have once felt something merely regards me:
eyes telling nothing, mouth saying nothing, nothing
reflected but the things of the world, nothing told,
not of any weeks, no, already 10 days now,
any 10 days' normal doings.
Shouldn't the face evidence anguish?
Shouldn't its loving sadness and loss be revealed?
Ineffable, vague, elusive, uncertain,
distracted, shouldn't grief have a form of its own,
and shouldn't mind know past its vague uncertain distraction
the sureness of sorrow?
Shouldn't soul flinch, as we're taught proper souls are supposed
to, in reverence and fear?
Shouldn't grief be pure and complete,
reshaping the world in itself, in grief for itself?
80, dying in bed, tubes in her chest,
my mother puts on her morning makeup,
the broad death strokes of foundation,
the blended-in rouge, powder, eye shadow, lipstick,
that concentration with which you
must gaze at yourself, that ravenous, unfaltering focus.
Grief, for my mother, for whatever
she thought her face had to be to be made every morning,
grief for my mother-in-law and her last declining,
destroying dementia, getting it wrong,
the thick ropes of rouge, garish, green paint on her lips,
mad, misplaced slash of mascara.
Grief for all women's faces, applied,
created, trying to manifest what the soul seeks to be,
grief for the faces of all human beings, our own faces telling us
so much and no more, offering pain to all who behold them,
but which when they turn to themselves petrify, pose.
Grief for the faces of adults who must gaze in their eyes
deeply so as not to glimpse death and grief
for the young who see only their own relentless
and grievous longing for love.
Grief for my own eyes that try to seek
truth even of pain, of grief, but find only approximation.
My face beneath your face, face of grief, countenance of loss,
of fear, irrevocable extinction, matrix laid upon matrix,
mystery on mystery, guise upon guise, semblance, effigy,
likeness.
Oh, to put the face of grief on in the morning--
the tinting, smoothing, shining, and shaping, and at the end
of the day to remove it, detach it,
emerge from the sorrowful mask.
Stripped, now, of its raiment, the mouth,
caught in its last labored breath,
finds last resolution, all the flesh now stripped
of its guises, moved towards its face in the peace of the Earth,
grief for the Earth, accepting the grief of the flesh
and the grief of our grieving forever, grief
for the flesh and the body and face,
for the eyes that can see only into the world and the mind that
can only think and feel what the world gives
it to think and to feel.
Grief of the mind gone, the flesh gone, the imperfect pain
that must stay for its moment, and grief
for the moment, its partial beauties,
its imperfect affections, all severed, all torn.
I'll read some shorter, softer poems.
It's a series called "Symbols."
The first one is "Wind."
Night.
A wildly lashing deluge driving in great gusts over the blind
defeated fields, the usually stoical larches
and pines only the mewling of their suddenly malleable
branches.
A wind like a knife that never ceased
shrieking except during the stunning volleys of thunder.
By morning 100 pullets in the hen house had massed in a corner
and smothered, an inert intricate structure
of dulled iridescence and still distracted,
still frenzied eyes, the vivid sapphire
of daybreak tainted by a vaporous, gorge swelling fetor.
The tribe of survivors compulsively hammered
their angular faces as usual into the trough:
nothing in the world, they were saying,
not carnage or dissolution, can bear reflection.
The simplest acts of being, they were saying,
can obliterate all--
all madness, all mourning.
It's funny that's an image, that's
something happened to me when I was probably about 11.
And I started thinking of a way to write about it.
As soon as I started writing, I knew that it was something
that I wanted to do something with
and it took decades and decades before I
could make it shape itself.
This is called "Owl."
The just fledged baby owl a waiter
has captured under a tree near the island restaurant
seems strangely unfazed to be on display on a Formica table,
though she tilts ludicrously, all her weight on one leg,
as though she had merely paused in her lift towards departure.
Immobile except for her constantly
swiveling head she unpredictably fixes her gaze,
clicking from one far focus to another: sea, tree, sky,
sometimes, it seems, even star, but never on hand or eye,
no matter how all in the circle around her chirp and cajole.
Thus the gods once.
Thus still perhaps gods: that scrutiny
densely grained as the rotation calibrated
on chromium bearings, dilation, contraction, wrath, disdain,
and remove, but oh to be slipping
ever backwards in time, the savage memories, the withheld
cry.
That takes place in Greece and of course in Greece Athena,
her symbol is the owl and that's how
the poem sort of came together.
Little secrets of the depths there.
"Dog"-- they're all little series
of poems that take one little image like that
and then try to do something with it.
"Dog."
Howl after pitiful, aching howl, an enormous, efficiently
muscular Doberman Pinscher has trapped itself
in an old-fashioned phone booth, the door closed firmly upon it.
But when someone approaches to try to [AUDIO OUT] it,
the howl quickens and descends.
And if someone in pity dares anyway lean on and crack open
and inch the obstinate hinge, the quickened howl
is a snarl, the snarl of blade lathed
and the scarlet gape of the gullet.
And the creature powers itself towards that sinister slit,
eyes flattened, fangs flashing, the way,
caught in the deepest, most unknowing cell of itself,
heart's secret, heart's wound, decorous usually, seemly,
though starving now, desperate, will turn, nonetheless, raging,
ready to kill or die to stay where it is, to maintain itself
just as it is--
decorous, seemly.
"Fire."
The plaster had been burnt from the studs.
2 by 4 joists were eaten with char, ceiling smoke blackened,
glass fragments and foul soaked rags of old rug underfoot.
Even the paint on the outside brick
had bubbled and scabbed and blistered and melted away.
Though the fire was ostensibly out,
smoke still drifted up through cracks in the floor
and sometimes a window sill or a door frame
would erupt in pale insidious flames, subtle in the darkness,
their malignancies masked in blushes of temperate violet
and rose.
Like love, it was.
Love ill and soiled like offend--
affection, affinity, passion misused and consumed,
warmth betrayed, patience exhausted, distorted,
all evidence of kindness now unkindness,
still the hulk, the gutted carcass,
fuming ash and ember misery and shame.
The way that one was written was that when I was a young poet
and one did things like this I was walking
by a building that was on fire.
And the firemen were all there putting out the fire;
it was a row house in Philadelphia.
And I just walked in, I thought that's the kind of thing
I thought you're supposed to do if you're a poet.
And I walked in and I just wandered through the house
and the firemen obviously thought that there was
some reason for my being there.
And I was gathering the images for this poem that
happened a long time later.
"Wig."
The bus that won't arrive this freezing bleak pre
Sabbath afternoon must be Messiah.
The be-wigged woman pacing the sidewalk, furious, seething,
can be only the mystic Shekinah, the presence of God
torn from Godhead, chagrined, abandoned, longing to rejoin,
reunite.
The husband and his beard and black hat
pushing a stroller a step behind her
as she stalks the human spirit which
must slog through such degrading tracks of slush and street
filth, bound forever to its other
no matter how incensed she may be,
how obliviously self-absorbed.
And the child asleep, serene, uncaring, and the crank and roar
of traffic, his cheeks afire, ladders of snowy light leaping
and swirling above him, is what else but psyche, holy psyche,
always only now just born, always only now
just waking to the ancient truths of knowledge, suffering,
loss.
The next one is called "Garden."
It's a little different from the rest.
A garden I usually never would visit--
oaks, roses, the scent of roses.
I usually wouldn't remark, but do
now, in a moment, for no reason, suddenly unlike any other--
numinous, limpid, abundant, whose serenity lifts and enfolds
me as a swirl of breeze lifts the leaves and enfolds them.
Nothing ever like this, not even love, .
Though there's no need to measure,
no need to compare, for once not to be waiting,
to be in the world as time moves through and across me,
to exalt in this fragrant light given
to me in this flow of warmth given to me and the world.
Then, on my hand beside me on the bench, something--
I thought somebody else's hand alighted.
I flinched it off and saw sorrow, a warbler--
gray, black, yellow-- in flight already away.
It stopped near me in a shrub, though,
and waited as though unstartled, as though unafraid,
as though to tell me my reflex of fear
was no failure, that if I believed I had lost something,
I was wrong because nothing can be lost of the self,
of a lifetime, of bringing forth selves.
Then it was gone, its branch springing back empty.
Still oak, though.
Still rose.
Still world.
That was a very nice morning.
"Storm."
This is one of my ecological poems.
Being in Tucson for--
having been here 35 years ago and being back now makes you
think seriously of such things.
As what we're doing to the planet.
Storm-- this doesn't take place in Tucson,
you'll see there's a lot of rain in it
so we know it's not Tucson.
Storm.
Another burst of the interminable intermittently
torrential dark afternoon downpour
and the dozens of tirelessly garrulous courtyard sparrows
stop hectoring each other and rush
to park under a length of cornice endearingly soiled
with decades of wing grease.
The worst summer in memory, thermal inversion, smog,
swelter, intimations of global warming,
though the plain trees still thrust forth buds
as though innocent April were just blooming, last week's
tentative pre-green leaflings were already
woefully charred with heat and pollution.
Thunder far off, benign, then closer slashes of lightning,
a massive concussive scrolling, an answering tremor
in the breast, the exaltation at sharing a planet with this, then
sorrow that we really might strip it
of all but the bare wounded rock lumbering down its rote rail.
A denser veil of clouds now, another darkening down lash,
the wind rises, the sparrows scatter, the leaves quake,
and oh I throw myself this way, the trees say then that way.
I tremble, I moan, and still you don't
understand the absence I'll be in the void
of unredeemable time.
12 suns, the prophecies promise.
12 vast suns of purification will
mount the horizon to scorch, sear, burn away,
then 12 cosmic cycles of rain, no tree left, no birdsong,
only the vigilant acid waves vindictively scouring themselves
again and again on no shore.
Imagine then the emergence: oh, this way,
the sky streaked, oh, that way, with miraculous brightness.
Imagine us beginning again, timid and tender,
with a million years more this time to evolve,
an epoch more on all fours, stricken with shame
and repentance before we fire our forges.
"The Heart."
When I saw my son's heart blown up in bland black
and white on the sonogram screen in amoebic jelly like mass,
barely contained by invisible layers of membrane,
I felt faint.
Eight years old, Jed lay, apparently unafraid,
wires strung from him into the clicking machine
as the doctor showed us a pliable, silvery lid
he explained was the valve benignly prolapsed,
which to me looked like some lost lunar creature biting, too
avid, urgently at an alien air, the tiniest
part of that essence I'd always allowed myself to believe
could stand for the soul.
Revealed now in the nakedness nearly not
to be looked upon as the muscular ghost of itself.
It majestically swelled and contracted
while I stood trembling before it, in love, in dread.
This is a poem about movie making.
I live in Paris part of the time and I noticed at one point
they had closed down a street to make a movie
and I realized that any place in the world where you set up
enough cameras and enough trucks, everything
will stop and get out of your way
so that you can make your movie.
And this is the poem I got out--
it's called "Exterior: Day" which
is the way they describe shots in the script.
Two actors are awkwardly muscling
a coffin out of a doorway draped in black funeral hangings.
A third sobs-- unconvincingly though.
The director cries cut and they set up again.
Just then an old woman blind turns the corner guiding herself
down the side of the building.
She touches the velvet awning and visibly startles:
has someone died and she not been told?
You can almost see her, in her mind, move through the entrance
and feel her way up the stairs, knocking, trying
doors, who might be missing.
But out here, everything holds.
For a long moment, no one knows what to do.
The actors fidget.
The cameraman looks away.
The woman must be aware that the street is unduly quiet,
but she still doesn't move.
It begins to seem like a contest, an agon, illusion
and truth--
crew, onlookers, and woman, her hand still raised,
caught in the cloth, her vast, uninhabited gaze sweeping
across us.
That's what happened that day in Paris.
"The Game."
This is a riddle that's answered halfway through.
I used to offer $5 to any student who
could guess what the game was before we got there.
But then somebody won once, so I don't do it.
The Game.
Water was her answer, and I fell instantly
and I knew self destructively in love with her, had to have her,
would, I knew someday, I didn't care how,
and soon, too, have her, though I guessed already
it would have to end badly, though not so disastrously
as it did.
My answer, lion or eagle, wasn't important.
The truth would have been anything but myself.
The game of that first fateful evening
was what you'd want to come back as after you died.
It wasn't the last life or death contest we'd have,
only the least erotically driven and dangerous.
What difference if she was married and perhaps mad--
both only a little, I thought, wrongly.
There was only my jealous glimpse of her genius, then
my vision of vengeance, midnight, morning--
beneath me a planet possessed, cycles
of transfiguration and soaring, storms cross--
This is a love poem, "Grace" it's called.
Almost as good as her passion, I'll
think, almost as good as her presence or physical grace,
almost as good as making love with her,
I'll think in my last aching breath before last,
my glimpse before last of the light,
were her goodwill and good wit, the steadiness
of her affections.
Almost, I'll think, sliding away on my sleigh of departure,
the rind of my consciousness thinning,
the fear of losing myself of worse, losing her,
subsiding, as I think, hope it must.
Almost as good as her beauty, her glow,
was the music of her voice and laughter.
Almost as good as kissing her, being kissed back,
I hope I'll have strength still to think,
was watching her as she worked or read,
was beholding her selfless sympathy for son,
friend, sister, even was feeling her anger sometimes,
rarely lift against me, then be forgotten, put aside.
Almost, I'll think, as good as our unlikely coming together
was our constant mostly unspoken debate
as to whether good in the world was good in itself or--
my side-- only the absence of evil.
No need to say how much how we lived
was shaped by her bright spirit, her humor and hope.
Almost as good as living it, all improbable gift,
was watching her once cross our room, the reflections of night
rain she'd risen to, closed the window against,
flaring across her, doubling her light; then
feeling her come back to bed, reaching to find and embrace me
as I hope she'll be there to embrace me
as I sail away on that last voyage out of myself,
that last sorrowful passage out of her presence,
though her presence, I think, will endure as firmly.
Oh those are the-- poets, you will
know what it is, the rest-- it's just a very complicated form
that we use as repetitions.
It's called "The Villanelle of the Suicide's Mother."
My wife and I met a woman whose young daughter had just
committed suicide and she had a long conversation with.
The two refrain lines are things she said in the poem
she said to us at the time.
It was very upsetting of course and I tried for a long time
to figure out a way to write the poem
and finally the villanelle came and it
seemed to be the right way.
Villanelle of the Suicide's Mother.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.
Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.
She tried so hard, then she was tired of trying;
now I'm tired too, of trying to explain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.
The anxiety, the rage, the denying--
though I never blamed her for my pain.
It can seem her whole life was her dying, and mine, struggling
to save her, prying, conniving.
It was the chemistry in her brain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.
If I said she was easy I'd be lying.
The lens between her and the world was stained.
It can seem her whole life was her dying,
but the fact is stupefying.
Her absence tears at me like a chain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.
"Old Man."
Special: big tits!
says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine
on our neighborhood newsstand but forget [AUDIO OUT]
a lush fresh lip, blonde skin glowing gold,
sprawls there resplendent.
60 nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better
than harlots can still stir me.
Maybe coming of age in the American sensual darkness,
never seeing an unsmudged nipple, an uncensored vagina,
has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust
of the eye.
Always that erotic murmur.
I'm hardly myself if I'm not in a state of incipient desire.
God knows though there are worse twists your obsessions can take.
Last year in Israel a young ultra-orthodox rabbi guiding
some teenage girls through the shrine of the Shoah
forbade them to look in one room because there were images in it
were licentious.
The display was a photo: men and women stripped naked,
some trying to cover their genitals,
others too frightened to bother, lined up in snow,
waiting to be shot and thrown in a ditch.
The girls, to my horror, averted their gaze.
What carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them?
Even that, though, another confession.
Once in a book on pre-war Poland,
a studio portrait, an absolute angel with tormented,
tormenting eyes.
I kept finding myself at her page.
That she died in the camps made her--
I didn't dare wonder why--
more present, more precious.
Died in the camps--
that, too, people-- or Jews, anyway--
kept from their children back then.
But it was like it didn't have to be told.
Sex and death: how close they can seem.
So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me,
sometimes I think I confound them.
My wife's loveliness almost consumes me.
My passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds.
When we make love, her holding me everywhere,
all around me, I'm there and not there.
My mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions.
I live my life over as though I were drowning.
Then I am drowning in despair at having
to leave her, this, everything, all, unbearable, awful.
Still, to be able to die with no special contrition,
not having been slaughtered or enslaved,
and not having to know history's next mad rage ration--
it might be a relief.
No.
Again, no.
I don't mean that for a moment.
What I mean is the world holds me so tightly,
the good and the bad, my own follies
and weakness, that even this counterfeit Venus, with her sham
heat and her bosom probably plumped with gel, so moves me.
My breath catches.
Vamp, siren, seductress-- how much more
she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows,
how she incarnates our desperate human need for regard,
our passion to live in beauty, to be beauty,
to be cherished by glances, if by no more, of something
like love, or love.
Thank you.