ONE
HOPES
Based
on the known,
imagining
the confluence,
one
hopes for a florid excitement, a spastic
flailing,
some kind of
satisfaction.
A QUESTION TO THE STARS
Are
there any here
but
us chickens?
Have
there ever been?
END
OF TIME
The
season arrives with a clamor of geese.
And
at the end of it.
ANOTHER
We
note
the
unfamiliar sky.
PERMANENCE
Always
and always.
There
is this always, that always, there is
always.
TOURISM
Sometimes
the poor
can
sell their poverty
as if
they had chosen it.
THE
MENU
Gestures
affect instinct accent.
FAIRYTALE
She wore a
glass
athletic
shoe and left it
at the
door, danced off
barefoot.
In a
perfect world
all shoes
would fit.
STRAY DOG
The stray
dog
wonders
about its failings as a dog.
Something
about a compact broken.
SWEET
DREAM
I have
dreamed
an
epicure's dream. In the secret life of sleep
it seems I
have cancer and will surely die, but
that the
doctor says
death will
be a wasting away, so eat
while you
can, as much
as you
can, and I sing, Oh Death where is,
where is
thy sting.
ROMANCE
We call
the ocean Day
and the
lover Night.
So Night
swims the Day
in search
of his love, who floats
before him
on a raft of spray.
SACRAMENT
Christ
crowns the Virgin
and
virgins marry him.
They
content themselves with the possible.
I begin
the day with a shriek she said.
EN
DESHABILLE
It's given
to her to dangle a shoe, but for a toe
barefoot
in this most formal place.
NATURE
30 million
buffalo 120 million
hooves
raising the dust, at times
stampeding
in a deafening clatter, at others
a rumble
audible for miles.
3 billion
pigeons, the noise
of 3
billion pigeons,
the
shaking earth disturbing the slumbers of millions in their burrows.
If not
strings, then ribbons,
the solar
system a pattern of movements.
And who
may be King or Queen of the May?
DANGER
Let down
her hair and her eyes
became
pools in the forest.
At the end
of the hall are three dark doors.
Smite,
smitten.
Of love
the
danger.
NAMED
Named for
shape.
Named for
function.
Named
in any
case. As clouds
hold clues
to sky
or water.
CHILD IN
THE GARDEN
On a toy
harmonium
she plays
the dies irae
to
distract the child.
Like a
stone across water.
My mind’s
like a stone
on water,
to sink
one day,
tee hee tee hee.
PAGEANT
Miss
Angularity is very tall
but wears
high heels
to make
her feet look small.
IN THEORY
He tries
to imagine her toes,
goes
through a series of possibilities, as if
a clue to
the invisible.
Surely, he
thinks, there's a moral here,
a decision
inherent in form.
And
such
and such
was the life of him.
SOMETIMES
Sometimes
an insistent picture presents itself and sometimes
one walks
into and
through it like a tracking shot, but it's always
a picture.
Even at a moment like this when I summon it what's lost
is the
swift melding of things unseen. And sometimes
it's the
slow dance
of two and
the heat
and cold
and a hand
one
remembers, does it all
come back
does it all
come back
to.
Doesn't it
all come back to loss and language?
What can
be done
in a few
words,
what can
be done in words.
Body
and words
in deep
storage.
Think of
the street filled
with
extras in storied lives,
for each
of whom...
for each
of whom in storied lives
in the
moments between.
And the
smells of these.
The
skull's rictus.
These are
the marble halls I dreamt I dwelt in.
Add
another to the cacophony of voices.
Add
another.
author’s note: … I had been unsuccessfully trying to find a way back to
small poems after years of writing at the other end of baroque, and [re-reading]
Bronk had given me a nudge in the right direction, although he probably would
have found most of these poems in different ways totally scandalous. At the
least, I doubt he would have recognized their relationship to his own.
Bill's work is characterized by extreme care. Metaphors are few and deployed gingerly, and the matter of daily life enters most often just enough to suggest a context. And his concerns are almost exclusively with final things: on the fugitive nature of both the self and any kind of external reality, Being as if lost in the chaos of before the Biblical creation. “What we want is a here with a meaning,” he says in one of his poems, and goes on to demonstrate that we can't have it.
My own work is all about a here. Final things are the givens that I rarely talk about, and meaning is contingent and flexible. I'm perfectly comfortable with this; as a New Yorker diversity is my native language. …
That said, few of these poems dedicated to his practice really attempt to achieve it. Rather, they seem to me to dance around it as a fixed point. It's in fact “Sometimes,” a poem outside the group, that may come closest to Bill's poetry, though longer than all but a few of his, and I've chosen to place it immediately after them, as a sort of envoi.
(M.W.)Bill's work is characterized by extreme care. Metaphors are few and deployed gingerly, and the matter of daily life enters most often just enough to suggest a context. And his concerns are almost exclusively with final things: on the fugitive nature of both the self and any kind of external reality, Being as if lost in the chaos of before the Biblical creation. “What we want is a here with a meaning,” he says in one of his poems, and goes on to demonstrate that we can't have it.
My own work is all about a here. Final things are the givens that I rarely talk about, and meaning is contingent and flexible. I'm perfectly comfortable with this; as a New Yorker diversity is my native language. …
That said, few of these poems dedicated to his practice really attempt to achieve it. Rather, they seem to me to dance around it as a fixed point. It's in fact “Sometimes,” a poem outside the group, that may come closest to Bill's poetry, though longer than all but a few of his, and I've chosen to place it immediately after them, as a sort of envoi.
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