Collected Poems by C. K. Williams

beginning … the bullet …

The Cave
    I think most people are relieved the first time they actually know someone who goes crazy.
    It doesn’t happen the way you hear about it where the person gibbers and sticks to you like an insect:
    mostly there’s crying, a lot of silence, sometimes someone will whisper back to their voices.
    All my friend did was sit, at home until they found him, then for hours at a time on his bed in the ward,
    pointing at his eyes, chanting the same phrase over and over. “Too much fire!” he’d say. “Too much fire!”
    I remember I was amazed at how raggedy he looked, then annoyed because he wouldn’t answer me
    and then, when he was getting better, I used to pester him to tell me about that fire-thing.
    He’d seemed to be saying he’d seen too much and I wanted to know too much what
    because my obsession then was that I was somehow missing everything beyond the ordinary.
    What was only real was wrong. There were secrets that could turn you into stone,
    they were out of range or being kept from me, but my friend, if he knew what I meant, wouldn’t say,
    so we’d talk politics or books or moon over a beautiful girl who was usually in the visiting room when we were
    who mutilated herself. Every time I was there, new slashes would’ve opened out over her forearms and wrists
    and once there were two brilliant medallions on her cheeks that I thought were rouge spots
    but that my friend told me were scratches she’d put there with a broken light bulb when she’d run away the day before.
    The way you say running away in hospitals is “eloping.” Someone who hurts themselves is a “cutter.”
    How could she do it to herself? My friend didn’t think that was the question.
    She’d eloped, cut, they’d brought her back and now she was waiting there again,
    those clowny stigmata of lord knows what on her, as tranquil and seductive as ever.
    I used to storm when I’d leave her there with him. She looked so vulnerable.
    All the hours they’d have. I tormented myself imagining how they’d come together,
    how they’d tell each other the truths I thought I had to understand to live,
    then how they’d kiss, their lips, chaste and reverent, rushing over the forgiven surfaces.
    Tonight, how long afterwards, watching my wife undress, letting my gaze go so everything blurs
    but the smudges of her nipples and hair and the wonderful lumpy graces of her pregnancy,
    I still can bring it back: those dismal corridors, the furtive nods, the moans I thought were sexual
    and the awful lapses that seemed vestiges of exaltations I would never have,
    but now I know whatever in the mystery I was looking for, whatever brute or cloud I thought eluded me,
    isn’t lost in the frenzy of one soul or another, but next to us, in the touch, between.
    Lying down, fumbling for the light, moving into the shadow with my son or daughter, I find it again:
    the prism of hidden sorrow, the namelessness of nothing and nothing shuddering across me,
    and then the warmth, clinging and brightening, the hide, the caul, the first mind.

Hog Heaven
    for James Havard
    It stinks. It stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.
    It stinks in the mansions and it stinks in the shacks and the carpeted offices,
    in the beds and the classrooms and out in the fields where there’s no one.
    It just stinks. Sniff and feel it come up: it’s like death coming up.
    Take one foot, ignore it long enough, leave it on the ground long enough
    because you’re afraid to stop, even to love, even to be loved,
    it’ll stink worse than you can imagine, as though the whole air was meat pressing your eyelids,
    as though you’d been caught, hung up from the earth
    and all the stinks of the fear drain down and your toes are the valves dripping
    the giant stinks of the pain and the death and the radiance.
    Old people stink, with their teeth and their hot rooms, and the kiss,
    the age-kiss, the death-kiss, it comes like a wave and you want to fall