Wait

Wait

By C. K. Williams

 

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,

one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,   

another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was   

for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.

It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,   

relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.

Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,

you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,   

my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,   

trying to heave itself back to its other way with you.

But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran

as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you?

Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds?

Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it,

a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,   

not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve?

Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,

how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.

Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over

the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn,

to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?   

We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

When the spent day begins to frail

When the spent day begins to frail

by E. E. Cummings

when the spent day begins to frail
(whose grave already three or two
young stars with spades of silver dig)

by beauty i declare to you

if what i am at one o'clock
to little lips(which have not sinned
in whose displeasure lives a kiss)
kneeling, your frequent mercy begs,

sharply believe me, wholly, well
— did(wisely suddenly into
a dangerous womb of cringing air)
the largest hour push deep his din

of wallowing male(shock beyond shock
blurted) strokes, vibrant with the purr
of echo pouring in a mesh
of following tone: did this and this

spire strike midnight and did occur
bell beyond fiercely spurting bell
a jetted music splashing fresh
upon silence) i without fail

entered became and was these twin
imminent lisping bags of flesh;
became eyes moist lithe shuddering big,
the luminous laughter, and the legs

whereas, at twenty minutes to

one, i am this blueeyed Finn.
emerging from a lovehouse who
buttons his coat against the wind

And Then This Happened

Heroic physique
             Achilles
hidden, terrible
             trouble
Swishing & Flashing like a Tiger
The Lady or the...
Embodiment of Glorious Grief

Glorious grief of war
Beautiful, Graceful, Achilles
Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright
Burning, burning, but always
hidden, terrible
Grief, Lady, grief.

Grieve in silence,
like a Lady

His word "terrible" 
τρομερός Lady


Shame.
Hidden and terrible
Twice born Achilles
Escaped

With the Lady
Or was it the Tiger?

Proud, Predatory, Tiger
Women trouble
Hidden, terrible
Victim, Lady.
Play, Lady.

ωραίος Ένδοξος Ἀχιλλεύς
Sea spawned Achilles

Heroic Achilles, Dangerou
Hidden, terrible, trouble
Survived Lady
Desolate

The Lady or the Tiger?

I do not go and seek the youthful and inexperienced, but he comes and seeks me. When he shows the sincerity that marks the first recourse to divination, I instruct him. If he apply a second and third time, that is troublesome, and I do not instruct the troublesome.

Fire & Ice

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."

― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

"the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him"

“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the world has never heard before. Like Yeats's great outburst at the end of his life. This comes out of a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent, Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. The incredible difference between the achievement of A and the achievement of B is that B wanted it, so he made all kinds of sacrifices. A could have had it, but he didn’t give a damn.[...]

But what I was going on to say is that I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, 'Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,' but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I'm out, but short of that, I don't know. I hope to be nearly crucified,”
― John Berryman

Heating and Cooling--A Work in Progress

"Sure, come over so we can emotionally destroy one another. It's for my art." I'd said this as a joke. But I'm no longer laughing.

  

"Maybe I no longer find you smart, charming, or funny." I never said that. Not out loud. Never out loud.

"A tulip in the desert won't last long." You knew this to be true, you who claim to love nothing but your children and "hedonistic adventures." At least you love something. A man who loves something can never be truly evil.

I believe you loved me, but at the same time, somehow, deep down in my darkest heart, I also knew you played with my feelings. As if other people's feelings somehow weren't altogether real to you. As if you never trusted me to love you if I knew the truth. The truth of your fragility and terror. Life has been so cruel to you. I know. I smile and say nothing. We risk being subjected to worse cruelties.

But you have many cruelties.

I still can't escape the feeling that we've done this, all of this, before. There were portents; signs to be read and interpreted. We are familiar and yet do not know each other. Why did I even write this for you? In part, because you're so breathtakingly perfect that it makes my soul ache. I still have this fantasy of you. The perfect you. The dream I had of you and I in perfect union.