Charles Kenneth Williams

A young mother on a motor scooter stopped at a traffic light, her little son perched
on the ledge between her legs; she in a gleaming helmet, he in a replica of it, smaller, but
the same color and just as shiny. His visor is swung shut, hers is open.
...

If that someone who's me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,
as he is, shouldn't he have been there when I said so long ago that thing
I said?
...

Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms
against being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days
not to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs?
...

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,
complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in
...

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
...

1

Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,
from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need.

Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block,
and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected,

where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation
as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.

Rembrandt knew of all this—isn't his flayed beef carcass really a caveman?
It's Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are.

Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations—
Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.

2

But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely
that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal

within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain,
aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards.

Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec
your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance!

Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling,
we're no longer compelled to devour our enemies' brains, thanks to our butcher,

who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure
where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.
...

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—

I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,
"a hundred spheres shining," he rhapsodizes, "the purest pearls…"

then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp
of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave,

a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures,
their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings

churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one,
perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others,

was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up
from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings

as though it couldn't believe I was there, or were trying to place me,
to situate me in the gnarl we'd evolved from, and now,

the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again,
this time the way he'll refer to a figure he meets as "the life of…"

not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I,
our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives,

his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem,
mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark,

his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist,
mine having to know for us both that everything ends,

world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away
like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.
...

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you'll never catch your breath,
mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,
feels the way you do with your nail when you're fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed;
the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ...

No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;
it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen,
something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;
as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,
a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand
it's we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,
drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.
...

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she's reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she "affirms herself physically," that is,
becomes present in a way she hadn't been before: though she hasn't moved, she's allowed herself
to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can't help but remark
her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn't pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,
but it's still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:
a memory—a girl I'd mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,
our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,
my having to realize it wasn't her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.
The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,
and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,
(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,
(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again
as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.
...

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,
offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she'd found me—
I can't remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things—
she'd decided that I was after all all right ... twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere
and I realize that it wasn't my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant,
which, when we'd been introduced, I'd naturally aimed at her and which she'd easily deflected,
but that she'd thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,
what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.
...

I was walking home down a hill near our house
on a balmy afternoon
under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here
every spring with
their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing
no it was more of
a cadenced shouting
Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because
the young man was
black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell he was making his
song up which pleased
me he was nice-looking
Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously
full of himself
hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed
me there almost
beside him and 'Big'
He shouted-sang 'Big' and I thought how droll
to have my height
incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing
he looked
in fact pointedly away
And his song changed 'I'm not a nice person'
he chanted 'I'm not
I'm not a nice person'

No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat
but he did want
to be certain I knew
That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord
between us I should forget it

That's all nothing else happened his song became
indecipherable to
me again he arrived
Where he was going a house where a girl in braids
waited for him on
the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and
unanswered questions
were left where they were
It occurred to me to sing back 'I'm not a nice
person either' but I
couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he have believed
it both of us
knew just where we were
In the duet we composed the equation we made
the conventions to
which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that
someone something
is watching and listening
Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though
no one saw nor
heard no one was there
...

An ax-shattered
bedroom window
the wall above
still smutted with
soot the wall
beneath still
soiled with
soak and down

on the black
of the pavement
a mattress its ticking
half eaten away
the end where
the head would
have been with
a nauseous bite

burnt away
and beside it
an all at once
meaningless heap
of soiled sodden
clothing one
shoe a jacket
once white

the vain matters
a life gathers
about it symbols
of having once
cried out to itself
who art thou?
then again who
wouldst thou be?
...

Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious
about crisis, calamity, disaster, or unknowingly crave them.
These horrific conditionals, these expected unexpecteds,
we dwell on them, flinch, feint, steel ourselves:
but mightn't our forebodings actually precede anxiety?
Isn't so much sheer heedfulness emblematic of desire?

How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade.

Of course, we're rarely swept into events, other than domestic tumult,
from which awful consequences will ensue. Fortunately rarely.
And yet we sweat as fervently
for the most insipid issues of honor and unrealized ambition.
Lost brothership. Lost lust. We engorge our little sorrows,
beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.

Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."
Always, "What will have been done to me?"
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?
...

Furiously a crane
in the scrapyard out of whose grasp
a car it meant to pick up slipped,
lifts and lets fall, lifts and lets fall
the steel ton of its clenched pincers
onto the shuddering carcass
which spurts fragments of anguished glass
until it's sufficiently crushed
to be hauled up and flung onto
the heap from which one imagines
it'll move on to the shredding
or melting down that awaits it.

Also somewhere a crow
with less evident emotion
punches its beak through the dead
breast of a dove or albino
sparrow until it arrives at
a coil of gut it can extract,
then undo with a dexterous twist
an oily stretch just the right length
to be devoured, the only
suggestion of violation
the carrion jerked to one side
in involuntary dismay.

Splayed on the soiled pavement
the dove or sparrow; dismembered
in the tangled remnants of itself
the wreck, the crane slamming once more
for good measure into the all
but dematerialized hulk,
then luxuriously swaying
away, as, gorged, glutted, the crow
with savage care unfurls the full,
luminous glitter of its wings,
so we can preen, too, for so much
so well accomplished, so well seen.
...

That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a block of ice:
the way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, fractures, facets;
dazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly complicate the cosmos of its innards.
Radiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a treasure horde of light,
when you stab it with the awl again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both faces sadly grainy, gnawed at, dull.

What was called an ice-house was a dark, low place, of raw, unpainted wood,
always black with melted ice or ice as yet ungelled;
there was saw-dust, and saw-dust's tantalizing, half-sweet odor, which, so cold, seemed to pierce directly to the brain.
You'd step onto a low-roofed porch, someone would materialize,
take up great tongs and with precise, placating movements like a lion-tamer's slide an ice block from its row.

Take the awl again yourself now, thrust, and when the block splits do it yet again, again;
watch it disassemble into smaller fragments, crystal after fissured crystal.
Or if not the puncturing blade, try to make a metaphor, like Kafka's frozen sea within:
take into your arms the cake of actual ice, make a figure of its ponderous inertness,
of the way its quickly wetting chill against your breast would frighten you and make you let it drop.

Imagine then how even if it shattered and began to liquefy,
the hope would still remain that if you acted quickly, gathering up the slithery, perversely skittish ovals,
they might be refrozen and the mass reconstituted, with precious little of its brilliance lost,
just this lucent shimmer on the rough, raised grain of water-rotten floor,
just this drop as sweet and warm as blood evaporating on your tongue.
...

chances are we will sink quietly back
into oblivion without a ripple
we will go back into the face
down through the mortars as though it hadn't happened

earth: I'll remember you
you were the mother you made pain
I'll grind my thorax against you for the last time
and put my hand on you again to comfort you

sky: could we forget?
we were the same as you were
we couldn't wait to get back sleeping
we'd have done anything to be sleeping

and trees angels for being thrust up here
and stones for cracking in my bare hands
because you foreknew
there was no vengeance for being here

when we were flesh we were eaten
when we were metal we were burned back
there was no death anywhere but now
when we were men when we became it
...

I was lugging my death from Kampala to Krakow.
Death, what a ridiculous load you can be,
like the world trembling on Atlas's shoulders.

In Kampala I'd wondered why the people, so poor,
didn't just kill me. Why don't they kill me?
In Krakow I must have fancied I'd find poets to talk to.

I still believed then I'd domesticated my death,
that he'd no longer gnaw off my fingers and ears.
We even had parties together: "Happy," said death,

and gave me my present, a coffin, my coffin,
made in Kampala, with a sliding door in its lid,
to look through, at the sky, at the birds, at Kampala.

That was his way, I soon understood, of reverting
to talon and snarl, for the door refused to come open:
no sky, no bird, no poets, no Krakow.

Catherine came to me then, came to me then,
"Open your eyes, mon amour," but death
had undone me, my knuckles were raw as an ape's,

my mind slid like a sad-ankled skate, and no matter
what Catherine was saying, was sighing, was singing,
"Mon amour, mon amour," the door stayed shut, oh, shut.

I heard trees being felled, skinned, smoothed,
hammered together as coffins. I heard death
snorting and stamping, impatient to be hauled off, away.

But here again was Catherine, sighing, and singing,
and the tiny carved wooden door slid ajar, just enough:
the sky, one single bird, Catherine: just enough.
...

One branch, I read, of a species of chimpanzees has something like territorial wars,
and when the . . . army, I suppose you'd call it, of one tribe prevails and captures an enemy,"Several males hold a hand or foot of the rival so the victim can be damaged at will."

This is so disquieting: if beings with whom we share so many genes can be this cruel,
what hope for us? Still, "rival," "victim," "will"—don't such anthropomorphic terms
make those simians' social-political conflicts sound more brutal than they are?

The chimps Catherine and I saw on their island sanctuary in Uganda we loathed.
Unlike the pacific gorillas in the forest of Bwindi, they fought, dementedly shrieked,
the dominant male lorded it over the rest; they were, in all, too much like us.

Another island from my recent reading, where Columbus, on his last voyage,
encountering some "Indians" who'd greeted him with curiosity and warmth, wrote,
before he chained and enslaved them, "They don't even know how to kill each other."

It's occurred to me I've read enough—at my age all it does is confirm my sadness.
Surely the papers: war, terror, torture, corruption—they're like broken glass in the mind.
Back when I knew I knew nothing, I read all the time, poems, novels, philosophy, myth,

but I hardly glanced at the news, there was a distance between what could happen
and the part of myself I felt with: now everything's so tight against me I hardly can move.
The Analects say people in the golden age weren't aware they were governed; they just lived.

Could I have passed through my own golden age and not even known I was there?
Some gold: nuclear rockets aimed at your head, racism, sexism, contempt for the poor.
And there I was, reading. What did I learn? Everything, nothing, too little, too much . . .
Just enough to get me here: a long-faced, white-haired ape with a book, still turning the page.
...

When Blackstone the magician cut a woman in half in the Branford theater
near the famous Lincoln statue in already part way down the chute Newark,

he used a gigantic buzz saw, and the woman let out a shriek that out-shrieked
the whirling blade and drilled directly into the void of our little boy crotches.

That must be when we learned that real men were supposed to hurt women,
make them cry then leave them, because we saw the blade go in, right in,

her waist was bare—look!—and so, in her silvery garlanded bra, shining,
were her breasts, oh round, silvery garlanded tops of breasts shining.

Which must be when we went insane, and were sent to drive our culture insane . . .
"Show me your breasts, please." "Shame on you, hide your breasts: shame."

Nothing else mattered, just silvery garlanded breasts, and still she shrieked,
the blade was still going in, under her breasts, and nothing else mattered.

Oh Branford theater, with your scabby plaster and threadbare scrim,
you didn't matter, and Newark, your tax-base oozing away to the suburbs,

you didn't matter, nor your government by corruption, nor swelling slums—
you were invisible now, those breasts had made you before our eyes vanish,

as Blackstone would make doves then a horse before our eyes vanish,
as at the end factories and business from our vanquished city would vanish.

Oh Blackstone, gesturing, conjuring, with your looming, piercing glare.
Oh gleaming, hurtling blade, oh drawn-out scream, oh perfect, thrilling arc of pain.
...

Face powder, gun powder, talcum of anthrax,
shavings of steel, crematoria ash, chips
of crumbling poetry paper—all these in my lock-box,
and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.

Saw-, silk-, chalk-dust and chaff,
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on; dust even from that scoured,

scraped littoral of the Aegean,
troops streaming screaming across it
at those who that day, that age or forever
would be foe, worthy of being dust for.

Last, hovering dust of the harvest, brief
as the half-instant hitch in the flight
of the hawk, as the poplets of light
through the leaves of the bronzing maples.

Animal dust, mineral, mental, all hoarded
not in the jar of sexy Pandora, not
in the ark where the dust of the holy aspiring
to congeal as glorious mud-thing still writhes—

Just this leathery, crackled, obsolete box,
heart-sized or brain, rusted lock shattered,
hinge howling with glee to be lifted again . . .
Face powder, gun powder, dust, darling dust.
...