C.K. Williams the World

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."

Sample poems of C.K Williams follow here by permission of the author.

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.

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!

"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.