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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466880597 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 295 KB |
About the Author
C. K. Williams (1936–2015) published twenty-three books of poetry, including Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. He lived in New Jersey.
Read an Excerpt
Flesh and Blood
By C. K. Williams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1987 C. K. WilliamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8059-7
CHAPTER 1
Elms
All morning the tree men have been taking down the stricken elms skirting the broad sidewalks.
The pitiless electric chain saws whine tirelessly up and down their piercing, operatic scales
and the diesel choppers in the street shredding the debris chug feverishly, incessantly,
packing truckload after truckload with the feathery, homogenized, inert remains of heartwood,
twig and leaf and soon the block is stripped, it is as though illusions of reality were stripped:
the rows of naked 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 ..."
Hooks
Possibly because she's already so striking — tall, well dressed, very clear, pure skin —
when the girl gets on the subway at Lafayette Street everyone notices her artificial hand
but we also manage, as we almost always do, not to be noticed noticing, except one sleeping woman,
who hasn't budged since Brooklyn but who lifts her head now, opens up, forgets herself,
and frankly stares at those intimidating twists of steel, the homely leather sock and laces,
so that the girl, as she comes through the door, has to do in turn now what is to be done,
which is to look down at it, too, a bit askance, with an air of tolerant, bemused annoyance,
the way someone would glance at their unruly, apparently ferocious but really quite friendly
dog.
Nostalgia
In the dumbest movie they can play it on us with a sunrise and a passage of adagio Vivaldi —
all the reason more to love it and to loathe it, this always barely choked-back luscious flood,
this turbulence in breast and breath that indicates a purity residing somewhere in us,
redeeming with its easy access the thousand lapses of memory shed in the most innocuous day
and canceling our rue for all the greater consciousness we didn't have for past, lost presents.
Its illusion is that we'll retain this new, however hammy past more thoroughly than all before,
its reality, that though we know by heart its shabby ruses, know we'll misplace it yet again,
it's what we have, a stage light flickering to flood, chintz and gaud, and we don't care.
Artemis
The lesbian couple's lovely toddler daughter has one pierced ear with a thin gold ring in it
and the same abundant, flaming, almost movie-starlet hair as the chunkier of the women.
For an entire hour she has been busily harrying the hapless pigeons of the Parc Montholon
while the other two sit spooning on a bench, caressing, cradling one another in their arms
then striking up acquaintance with a younger girl who at last gets up to leave with them.
They call the child but she doesn't want to go just yet, she's still in the game she's made.
It's where you creep up softly on your quarry, then shriek and stamp and run and wave your arms
and watch as it goes waddle, waddle, waddle, and heaves itself to your great glee into the air.
Guatemala: 1964
for Loren Crabtree
The Maya-Quechua Indians plodding to market on feet as flat and tough as toads were semi-starving
but we managed to notice only their brilliant weaving and implacable, picturesque aloofness.
The only people who would talk to us were the village alcoholic, who sold his soul for aguardiente,
and the Bahia nurse, Jenny, middle-aged, English-Nicaraguan, the sole medicine for eighty miles,
who lord knows why befriended us, put us up, even took us in her jeep into the mountains,
where a child, if I remember, needed penicillin, and where the groups of dark, idling men
who since have risen and been crushed noted us with something disconcertingly beyond
suspicion.
Good Jenny: it took this long to understand she wasn't just forgiving our ferocious innocence.
Herakles
A mysterious didactic urgency informs the compelling bedtime stories he is obsessively recounted.
Misty, potent creatures, half human, half insane with hatred and with lustings for the hearth:
the childhood of the race, with always, as the ground, the urgent implication of a lesson.
Some of it he gets, that there are losses, personal and epic, but bearable, to be withstood,
and that the hero's soul is self-forged, self-conceived, hammered out in outrage, trial,
abandon, risk.
The parables elude him, though: he can never quite grasp where the ever-after means to
manifest.
Is he supposed to be this darkly tempered, dark fanatic of the flesh who'll surely
consume himself?
Or should it be the opposite: would all these feats and deeds be not exemplary but cautionary?
First Desires
It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew anything at all about the music,
what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of the orchestra each represented:
there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thinnings, the winding cries of change
that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of you and then apart from you.
And even when you'd learned the grainy timbre of the single violin, the ardent arpeggios of the horn,
when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left, an ache, a sense of longing
that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the dominant's resolve into the tonic,
as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you knew it was more likely) you.
The Dirty Talker: D Line, Boston
Shabby, tweedy, academic, he was old enough to be her father and I thought he was her father,
then realized he was standing closer than a father would so I thought he was her older lover.
And I thought at first that she was laughing, then saw it was more serious, more strenuous:
her shoulders spasmed back and forth; he was leaning close, his mouth almost against her ear.
He's terminating the affair, I thought: wife ill, the kids ... the girl won't let him go.
We were in a station now, he pulled back half a head from her the better to behold her,
then was out the hissing doors, she sobbing wholly now so that finally I had to understand —
her tears, his grinning broadly in — at me now though, as though I were a
portion of the story.
Repression
More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression,
sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,
and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude, indifference,
now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions
to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications
I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days, days when the idea alone of
psychic peace, of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have meant inconceivable
capitulation.
Como
In the Mercedes station wagon with diplomatic plates the mother has gone out somewhere again.
The husband is who knows and who cares where in his silver Porsche nine-twenty-eight.
As they come across the dismal hotel garden from their after-dinner promenade along the lake,
the three noisy, bratty kids are all over the pretty German teenager who minds them.
One tugs at one hand, another at the other, the snotty baby pulls at her wrinkled skirt and wails
but for all the au pair notices they might not be there, she might be on the dance floor at a ball.
It's not until the grizzled kitchen mouse-cat strolls out on the path that she comes to life,
kneeling, whispering, fervently coaxing the coy thing with tempting clicks and rubbings of her hands.
One Morning in Brooklyn
The snow is falling in three directions at once against the sienna brick of the houses across,
but the storm is mild, the light even, the erratic wind not harsh, and, tolling ten o'clock,
the usually undistinguished bells of the Sixth Street cathedral assume an authoritative dignity,
remarking with ponderous self-consciousness the holy singularities of this now uncommon day.
How much the pleasant sense, in our sheltering rooms, of warmth, enclosure: an idle, languid taking in,
with almost Georgian ease, voluptuous, reposeful, including titillations of the sin of well-being,
the gentle adolescent tempest, which still can't make up its mind quite, can't dig in and bite,
everything for show, flailing with a furious but futile animation wisps of white across the white.
Self-knowledge
Because he was always the good-hearted one, the ingenuous one, the one who knew no cunning,
who, if "innocent" didn't quite apply, still merited some similar connotation of naïveté, simplicity,
the sense that an essential awareness of the coarseness of other people's motives was lacking
so that he was constantly blundering upon situations in which he would take on good faith
what the other rapaciously, ruthlessly, duplicitously and nearly always successfully offered as truth ...
All of that he understood about himself but he was also aware that he couldn't alter at all
his basic affable faith in the benevolence of everyone's intentions and that because of this the world
would not as in romance annihilate him but would toy unmercifully with him until he was mad.
Alzheimer's: The Wife
for Renée Mauger
She answers the bothersome telephone, takes the message, forgets the message, forgets who called.
One of their daughters, her husband guesses: the one with the dogs, the babies, the boy Jed?
Yes, perhaps, but how tell which, how tell anything when all the name tags have been lost or switched,
when all the lonely flowers of sense and memory bloom and die now in adjacent bites of time?
Sometimes her own face will suddenly appear with terrifying inappropriateness before her in a mirror.
She knows that if she's patient, its gaze will break, demurely, decorously, like a well-taught child's,
it will turn from her as though it were embarrassed by the secrets of this awful hide-and-seek.
If she forgets, though, and glances back again, it will still be in there, furtively watching,
crying.
Alzheimer's: The Husband
for Jean Mauger
He'd been a clod, he knew, yes, always aiming toward his vision of the good life, always acting on it.
He knew he'd been unconscionably self-centered, had indulged himself with his undreamed-of good fortune,
but he also knew that the single-mindedness with which he'd attended to his passions, needs and whims,
and which must have seemed to others the grossest sort of egotism, was also what was really at the base
of how he'd almost offhandedly worked out the intuitions and moves which had brought him here,
and this wasn't all that different: to spend his long anticipated retirement learning to cook,
clean house, dress her, even to apply her makeup, wasn't any sort of secular saintliness —
that would be belittling — it was just the next necessity he saw himself as being called
to.
The Critic
In the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, where all the bums come in stinking from the cold,
there was one who had a battered loose-leaf book he used to scribble in for hours on end.
He wrote with no apparent hesitation, quickly, and with concentration; his inspiration was inspiring:
you had to look again to realize that he was writing over words that were already there —
blocks of cursive etched into the softened paper, interspersed with poems in print he'd pasted in.
I hated to think of the volumes he'd violated to construct his opus, but I liked him anyway,
especially the way he'd often reach the end, close his work with weary satisfaction, then open again
and start again: page one, chapter one, his blood-rimmed eyes as rapt as David's doing psalms.
New Car
Doesn't, when we touch it, that sheen of infinitesimally pebbled steel, doesn't it, perhaps,
give just a bit, yes, the subtlest yielding, yes, much less than flesh would, we realize,
but still, as though it were intending in some formal way that at last we were to be in contact
with the world of inorganics, as though, after all we've been through with it, cuts, falls, blows,
that world, the realm of carbon, iron, earth, the all-ungiving, was attempting, gently, patiently,
to reach across, respond, and mightn't we find now, not to our horror or even our discomfort,
that our tongue, as though in answer, had wandered gently from the mouth, as though it, too,
shriven of its limits, bud and duct, would sanctify this unity, would touch, stroke, cling, fuse?
Conscience
In how many of the miserable little life dramas I play out in my mind am I unforgivable,
despicable, with everything, love, kin, companionship, negotiable, marketable, for sale,
and yet I do forgive myself, hardly marking it, although I still remember those fierce
if innocently violent fantasies of my eternal adolescence which could nearly knock me down
and send me howling through myself for caves of simple silence, blackness, oblivion.
The bubble hardens, the opacities perfected: no one in here anymore to bring accusation,
no sob of shame to catch us in its throat, no omniscient angel, either, poor angel, child,
tremulous, aghast, covering its eyes and ears, compulsively washing out its mouth with soap.
Noise: Sinalunga
The cry of a woman making love in a room giving onto our hotel courtyard sounds just like Jed,
who has bronchitis, if he were saying "Ow!" in his sleep, loudly, from his room across the hall,
and so I am awake through another dawn in another small town in the country near Siena,
waiting for my son to wake up, too, and cough, or after weeks of this, please, not cough.
Now church bells from a nearby village; now sparrows, swallows, voices from a kitchen door,
as brilliant in the brilliant air as Cortona's Fra Angelico's Annunciation's scroll of angel speech.
Now an underpowered motorscooter on a hill and from the jukebox in the broken-down café,
the first still blessedly indecipherable traces of the ubiquitous American I-Loved-You rock ...
Anger
I killed the bee for no reason except that it was there and you were watching, disapproving,
which made what I would do much worse but I was angry with you anyway and so I put my foot on it,
leaned on it, tested how much I'd need to make that resilient, resisting cartridge give way
and crack! abruptly, shockingly it did give way and you turned sharply and sharply now
I felt myself balanced in your eyes — why should I feel myself so balanced always in your eyes;
isn't just this half the reason for my rage, these tendencies of yours, susceptibilities of mine? —
and "Why?" your eyes said, "Why?" and even as mine sent back my answer, "None of your affair,"
I knew that I was being once again, twice now, weighed, and this time anyway found wanting.
Even So
Though she's seventy-four, has three children, five grown grandchildren (one already pregnant),
though she married and watched two men die, ran a good business — camping goods, tents,
not established and left to her by either of the husbands: it was her idea and her doing —
lived in three cities, and, since retiring, has spent a good part of the time traveling:
Europe, Mexico, even China, at the same time as Arthur Miller (though she didn't see him),
even so, when the nice young driver of their bus, starting out that day from Amsterdam,
asks her if she'd like to sit beside him in the jump seat where the ill tour guide should sit,
she's flattered and flustered and for a reason she's surprised about, feels herself being proud.
Drought
A species of thistle no one had ever seen before appeared almost overnight in all the meadows,
coarse, gray-greenish clumps scattered anywhere the dying grass had opened up bare earth.
The farmers knew better or were too weary to try to fight the things, but their children,
walking out beside them through the sunset down the hillsides toward the still cool woods
along the narrowed brooks, would kick the plants or try to pry them out with pointed sticks:
the tenacious roots would hardly ever want to give, though, and it was too hot still to do much more
than crouch together where the thick, lethargic water filtered up and ran a few uncertain feet,
moistening the pebbles, forming puddles where the thriving insects could repose and reproduce.
End of Drought
It is the opposite or so of the friendly gossip from upstairs who stops by every other evening.
It's the time she comes in once too often, or it's more exactly in the middle of her tête-à-tête,
when she grows tedious beyond belief, and you realize that unless an etiquette is violated
this will just go on forever, the way, forever, rain never comes, then comes, the luscious opposite,
the shock of early drops, the pavements and the rooftops drinking, then the scent, so heady with release
it's almost overwhelming, thick and vaginal, and then the earth, terrified that she'd bungled it,
that she'd dwelt too long upon the problems of the body and the mind, the ancient earth herself,
like someone finally touching pen to page, breathes her languid, aching suspiration of relief.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Flesh and Blood by C. K. Williams. Copyright © 1987 C. K. Williams. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
I,
Elms,
Hooks,
Nostalgia,
Artemis,
Guatemala: 1964,
Herakles,
First Desires,
The Dirty Talker: D-Line, Boston,
Repression,
Como,
One Morning in Brooklyn,
Self-knowledge,
Alzheimer's: The Wife,
Alzheimer's: The Husband,
The Critic,
New Car,
Conscience,
Noise: Sinalunga,
Anger,
Even So,
Drought,
End of Drought,
Easter,
Girl Meets Boy,
Bishop Tutu's Visit to the White House: 1984,
Experience,
Resentment,
Mornings: Catherine,
The Ladder,
War,
Greed,
The Past,
Ice,
The Modern,
The Mistress,
The Lover,
Religious Thought,
Carpe Diem,
Twins,
The Telephone,
Failure,
Crime,
Fat,
Fame,
USOCA,
Eight Months,
Junior High School Concert: Salle Rossini,
The Prodigy,
Souls,
Regret,
Cowboys,
The Marriage,
Fifteen,
Sixteen: Tuscany,
Thinking Thought,
Jews,
Snow: I,
Snow: II,
Gardens,
The Star,
Kin,
Fire,
Dignity,
Fast Food,
The Orchid,
The City in the Hills,
From the Next Book by (...),
Native Americans,
Work,
Gratitude,
Will,
Pregnant,
Peace,
Some of Us,
Two: Resurrections,
Men,
Shame,
On the Other Hand,
The Fountain,
The Latin Quarter,
Rungs,
Normality,
The Storm,
Blame,
Medusa,
Rush Hour,
Philadelphia: 1978,
Midas,
The Park,
Travelers,
Second Persons: Café de L'Abbaye,
The Lens,
The Body,
Racists,
The Dream,
Dawn,
II,
Reading: Winter,
Reading: The Subway,
Reading: The Bus,
Reading: The Gym,
Reading: The Cop,
Reading: Early Sorrow,
Suicide: Elena,
Suicide: Ludie,
Suicide: Anne,
Love: Youth,
Love: Beginnings,
Love: Habit,
Love: Loss,
Love: Sight,
Love: Petulance,
Love: Intimacy,
Love: Shyness,
Love: Wrath,
Love: The Dance,
Good Mother: The Métro,
Good Mother: The Plane,
Good Mother: The Car,
Good Mother: Out,
Good Mother: The Street,
Good Mother: The Bus,
Good Mother: Home,
Vehicle: Conscience,
Vehicle: Forgetting,
Vehicle: Insecurity,
Vehicle: Indolence,
Vehicle: Circles,
Vehicle: Absence,
Vehicle: Violence,
III,
Le Petit Salvié,
Also by C. K. Williams,
Copyright,