POEM
Williams, C. K.
POEM C.K. Williams Storm Another hurst of the interminable, intermittently torrential dark afternoon downpour, and the dozens of tirelessly garrulous courtyard sparrows stop hectoring each...
...benign, then closer, slashes of lightning, a massive, concussive unscrolling, an answering tremor in the breast, the exaltation at sharing a planet with this, then sorrow, that we really might strip it of all but the bare wounded rock lumbering down its rote rail...
...imagine us, beginning again, timid and tender, with a million years more this time to evolve, an epoch more on all fours, stricken with shame and repentance, before we fire our forges...
...The worst summer in memory, thermal inversion, smog, swelter, intimations of global warming...
...though the plane trees still thrust forth buds as though innocent April were just blooming...
...I tremble, I moan, and still you don't understand the absence I'll be in the void of unredeemable time...
...A denser veil of clouds now, another darkening downlash, the wind rises...
...Thunder far off...
...Williams teaches in the writing program at Princeton University...
...His new book, "The Vigd," is forthcoming in January...
...the sparrows scatter, the leaves quake, and Oh...
...Williams's "Selected Poems " was puhlished in 1994 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux...
...last week's tentative pre-green leadings are already woefully charred with heat and pollution...
...Williams Storm Another hurst of the interminable, intermittently torrential dark afternoon downpour, and the dozens of tirelessly garrulous courtyard sparrows stop hectoring each other and rush to park under a length of cornice endearingly soiled with decades of wing-grease...
...Twelve suns, the prophecies promise, twelve vast suns of purification will mount the horizon, to scorch, sear, burn away, then twelve cosmic cycles of rain: no tree left, no birdsong...
...that way, with miraculous brightness...
...only the vigilant, acid waves, vindictively scouring themselves again and again on no shore...
...I throw myself this way, the trees say, then that way...
...Imagine then the emergence: Oh, this way, the sky streaked, Oh...
Vol. 60 • September 1996 • No. 9
