Name: Poems, 1963-1983
Rating: 3.83 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780374235161

M.W.P.M.

1,679 reviews29 followers

January 20, 2022

Poems: 1963-1983 brings together a selection of poems from C.K. Williams's first four collections: Lies , I Am the Bitter Name , With Ignorance , and Tar ...

From Lies ...

The man who owns sleep
is watching the prisoners being beaten
behind the fence.
His eyes pressed to the knothole,
he sees the leather curling into smiles
and snapping, he sees the intricate geography
of ruined backs,
the faces propped
open like suitcases
in the sunlight.

Who is this man
who's cornered the market
on sleeping?
He's not quite finished.
He bends over with a hand on his knee
to balance him
and from the other side they see
that clear eye in the wall
watching unblinking.
They see it has slept,

prisoners and guards: it drives them
to frenzies. The whips hiccup
and shriek. Those dead already roll over
and rub their retinas into the pebbles.
The man who owns sleep has had it.
He's tired.
Taking an ice cream cone
from the little wagon
he yawns and licks it.
Walking away, he yawns, licking it.
- The Man Who Owns Sleep, pg. 12

* * *

I hook my fingers into the old tennis court fence
and kneel down in an overgrowth of sharp weeds
to watc hthe troopers in their spare compound drill.

Do you remember when this was a park? When girls
swung their rackets here in the hot summer mornings
and came at night to open their bodies to us?

Now gun butts stamp the pale clay like hooves.
Hard boots gleam.
And still, children play tag and hide-and-seek.

beyond the barriers. Lovers sag in the brush.
It's not them, it's us: we know too much.
Soon only the past will know what we know.
- Of What Is Past, pg. 26

* * *

Here's where I started
running from a little bee
is here now coated with soot his back legs
stuck together with black honey
black granules
on his jaws he speaks in my voice
he spreads his wings and something
budges in him but
not me

I'm here now

I found one day
without dying

I found it when every
except for one man
cursing kept
quiet everyone but one corpse
with gold

in its gullet

I found it when
when I said HANDS
I meant
your breasts when I said
SILENCE I meant
what never touches

And did I come back?

I'm in eight pieces
like a toy truck
I'm in the mailbox I'm
in the cabin by the pond
I'm on the lawn

am I still
running?

I'm still running I'm still holding
everything together I'm still
me

I got there
where the lines met where
the laughter
opened the stones
desired something the slash mark
cried I got
there I got back I'm still
running nothing
comes in nothing
goes out I
see
- Or, pg. 38-39

* * *

I stand on the first step under the torn mouths of hours
in a new suit. Terrified of the arched webs and the dust,
of my speech, my own hair slicked with its thin pride,
I jut like a thorn; I turn, my pain turns and closes.

Tell me again about silence. Tell me I won't,
not ever, hear the cold men whispering in my pores
or the mother and father who scream in the bedroom
and throw boxes of money between them and kiss.

At the window, faces hover against the soft glow
like names. If I cry out, it will forget me and go;
if I don't, nothing begins again. Tell me
about mercy again, how she rides in eternity's arms

if the drifts and the dreams come. The night is dying.
Wisely it thinks of death as a thing born of desire.
Gently it opens its sharp ribs and bites through
and holds me. Tell me about my life again, where it is now.
- Patience Is When You Stop Waiting, pg. 48

From I Am the Bitter Name ...

the lonely people are marching
on the capital everyone's yelling not
to give them anything but just
buying dinner together was fun
wasn't it? don't give them a thing
the boss said the boss
is dreaming of beautiful nurses
the lonely people are taking
all their little dogs to washington
back home the channels change
by themselves the soap changes
to perfume perfume to cereal the boss
dreams of the moon landing on
spruce street nobody is lonely
on locust nobody is left
at all the comes up by himself
the buses go along by themselves
and wonder have I told you about
my disease? the lonely people
hold tight at night
on the coast they are tucked
in under the twilight
together the boss walks
across them it was fun it was
so much fun wasn't it?
- Keep It, pg. 64

* * *

somebody keeps tack of how many times
I make love don't you god don't you?
and how good it is telling me
it's marked down where I can't see
right underneath me so the next time
something unreal happens in the papers
I don't understand it it doesn't touch
me I start thinking
everyone's heart might be pure
after all because what the hell
they don't kill me just each other
they don't actually try making me sad
just do things make things happen
suffer things I erupt
into the feminine like a lion don't
I god? among doves? so even being with me
is like beauty? I move under this god
like a whore I gurgle I roll
like a toy boat what's the score
now god? am I winning?
- Innings, pg. 73

* * *

I dreamed of an instrument of political torture
so that the person thinks he's breathing into a great space
that flows like a river beyond men
into infinity the ethical disconnects like a phone
and what he says everything comes back to him WE ARE NOT DOING THIS
angels skulls prisoners WE ARE NOT DOING THIS
the children scouring themselves like genitals NOT DOING THIS

mother am I the enemy or the little brother?
they threw ropes around me I ran I covered myself
but they touched me the invalids licked me the poor kissed me
afterwards there is a bed afterwards a woman is there
her breasts she is cloud how she envelopes you
the coils shimmer nobody talks anymore nobody dreams this
WE ARE NOT DOING THIS
- Another Dollar, pg. 83

* * *

there's somebody who's dying
to eat god
when the name happens
the juices leap from the bottom of his mouth like waves
he almost falls over with lightheadedness
nobody has ever been this hungry before
you might know people who've never had anything
but teaspoons of rice or shreds
from the shin of an ape well that's nothing
you should know what this person would do
he'd pull handfuls of hair out of his children
and shove them down
he'd squeeze the docile bud in his wife
until it screamed
if you told him god lived in his own penis he'd bite into it
and tear like a carnivore
this is hoe men renounce
this is how we obliterate
one morning near the end he'll climb into the fire
and look back at himself
what was dark will be light
what was song will be roaring
and the worst thing is you'll still want this
beyond measure you'll still want this
believe me
you should know this
- They Warned Him Then They Threw Him Away, pg. 94

From With Ignorance ...

Once I went home to dinner with a carpenter who'd taken me under his wing
and was keeping everyone off my back while he helped me. He was beautiful but at his house, he sulked.
After dinner, he and the kids and I were watching television while his wife washed the dishes
and his mother, who lived with them, sat at the table holding a big cantaloupe in her lap,
fondling it and staring at it with the kind of intensity people usually only look into fire with.
The wife kept trying to take it away from her but the old lady squawked and my friend said, "Leave her alone, will you?" "But she's doing it on purpose," the wife said.
I was watching. The mother put both her hands on it then, with her thumbs spread,
as though the melon were a head and her thumbs were covering the eyes and she was aiming it like a gun or a camera.
Suddenly the wife muttered, "You bitch!" ran over the the bookshelf, took a book down -
A History of Revolutions - rattled through the pages and triumphantly handed it to her husband.
A photograph: someone who's been garroted and the executioner, standing behind him in a business hat,
had his thumbs just like that over the person's eyes, straightening the head,
so they you thought the thumbs were going to move away because they were only pointing
the person at something they wanted him to see and the one with the hands was going to say, "Look! Right there!"
"I told you," the wife said. "I swear to god she's trying to drive me crazy."
I didn't know what it all meant but my friend went wild, started breaking things, I went home
and when I saw him the next morning at breakfast he acted as though nothing had happened....
- from The Sanctity, for Nick and Arlene de Credico, pg. 135-136

* * *

I thought I was healing, for all I know I might have stayed forever in the grim room I was camped in
but one day some boys who must have climbed up through one of the abandoned tenements
suddenly appeared skidding and wrestling over the steep pitch of the old man's roof
and when I shouted at them to get the hell of, he must have thought I'd meant him:
he lurched in his bed and stopped rubbing himself with the white cream he used to use on his breasts.
He looked up, our eyes met, and I think for the first time he really believed I was there.
I don't know how long we stared at each other - I could hear the kids shrieking at me
and the road-building equipment that had just started tearing the skin from the avenue -
then his zincy fingers slowly subsided against his heart and he smiled,
a brilliant, total, incongruous smile, and even though I had no desire to,
the was afterwards I had no desire to cry when my children were born, but did,
sobbed, broke down with joy or some inadmissible apprehension, I smiled back.
It was as though we were lovers, as though, like lovers, we'd made speech again
and were listening as it gutted and fixed the space between us and then a violent,
almost physical loathing took me, for all I'd done to have ended in this place,
to myself, to everyone, to the whole business we're given the name life for.
- from Bread, pg. 151-152

* * *

Life stinks and death stinks and god and your hand touching your face
and every breath, daring to turn, daring to come back from the stop: the turn stinks
and the last breath, the real one, the one where everyone troops into your bed
and piles on - oh, that one stinks best! It stays in your mouth
and who you kiss not knows life and knows death, knows how it would be to fume in a nostril
and the thousand desires that stink like the stars and the voice heard through the stars
and each time - milk sour, egg sour, sperm sour - each time - dirty, friends, father -
each time - mother, tree, breath - each time - breath and breath and breath -
each time the same stink, the amazement, the wonder to do this and it flares,
this, and it stinks, this: it stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.
- from Hog Heaven, for James Havard, pg. 158

From Tar ...

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 the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded —I hadn't noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.
Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.
A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine,
and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the block
and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me,
their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.
I know where they're going—to the "Legion": once, when I was putting something out, they stopped,
both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn't ten o'clock—and we chatted for a bit.
I don't know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder if they're lovers?
They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along,
contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters,
tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat,
his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down,
to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.
In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show.
Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're not, at least, thank god, laughing.
Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.
Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.
He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot
catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down,
set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.
No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber,
the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair,
then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be,
and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he'd known,
all along, that I was watching and I can't help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,
I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.
It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold,
and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then realized made a figure eight,
what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,
and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.
Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he'd blazed,
but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away,
up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight,
with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signaling erratically
against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.
In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white,
its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.
- From My Window, pg. 175-177

* * *

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.

Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.
- Tar, pg. 217-219

Poems, 1963-1983

C.K. Williams

About the author

C.K. Williams

Ratings & Reviews

Friends & Following

Community Reviews

Join the discussion