Collected Poems by C. K. Williams Page B

again
    and she’d be lifting me with that same wounded sorrow or she would suddenly appear out of nowhere,
    blotting out everything but a single, blazing wing of holiness.
    Who knows the rest? I can still remember how it felt the old way.
    How I make my little thrust, how she crushes us against her, how I turn and snarl
    at the cold circle of faces around us because something’s torn in me,
    some ancient cloak of terror we keep on ourselves because we’ll do anything,
    anything, not to know how silently we knell in the mouth of death
    and not to obliterate the forgiveness and the lies we offer one another and call innocence.
    This is innocence. I touch her, we kiss.
    And this. I’m here or not here. I can’t tell. I stab her. I stab her again. I still can’t.

Friends
    My friend Dave knew a famous writer who used to have screwdrivers for breakfast.
    He’d start with half gin and half juice and the rest of the day he’d sit with the same glass
    in the same chair and add gin. The drink would get paler and paler, finally he’d pass out.
    Every day was the same. Sometimes, when I’m making milk for the baby, cutting the thick,
    sweet formula from the can with sterilized water, the baby, hungry again, still hungry,
    rattling his rickety, long-legged chair with impatience, I think of that story.
    Dave says the writer could talk like a god. He’d go on for hours in the same thought.
    In his books, though, you never find out why he drove so hard toward his death.
    I have a death in my memory that lately the word itself always brings back. I’m not quite sure why.
    A butterfly, during a downpour one afternoon, hooked onto my screen. I thought it was waiting.
    The light was just so. Its eyes caught the flare so it seemed to be watching me in my bed.
    When I got up to come closer and it should have been frightened, it hung on.
    After the rain, it was still there. Its eyes were still shining. I touched the screen
    and it fell to the ledge. There were blue streaks on its wings. A while later, the wind took it.
    The writer drowned in his puke or his liver exploded — it depends on the story.
    He was a strong man, for all that. He must have thought it was taking forever.
    Dave says when he’d wake with amnesia, he wouldn’t want you to fill in the gaps.
    He just wanted his gin and his juice. From all that you hear, he was probably right.
    When we were young and we’d drink our minds to extinction, that was the best part: you did this, you said that.
    It was like hearing yourself in a story. Sometimes real life is almost the same,
    as though you were being recited; you can almost tell what a thought is before it arrives.
    When I follow my mind now, another butterfly happens. It’s not hard to see why.
    It’s the country this time. The butterfly walked over the white table and onto my hand.
    I lifted it and it held. My friends were amazed. Catherine tried, too, but the butterfly fluttered away.
    I put my hand back in the air and it found me again. It came down on a finger and clung.
    Its sails listed. I could see it untwirling the barb of its tongue on my nail. I shook it away.
    Those were the days and the nights when Catherine and I were first falling in love.
    Sometimes, in the dark, I’d still be afraid but she’d touch my arm and I’d sleep.
    The visions I had then were all death: they were hideous and absurd and had nothing to do with my life.
    All I feel now about death is a sadness, not to be here with everyone I love,
    but in those days, I’d dream, I’d be wracked, Catherine would have to reach over to hold me.
    In the morning, it would be better. Even at dawn, when I’d wake first, trembling, gasping for air,
    I’d burrow back down, Catherine would open her eyes, smiling, with me at her breast, and it would be better.

The Shade
    A summer cold. No rash. No fever. Nothing. But a dozen times during the night I wake
    to listen to my son whimpering in his sleep, trying to snort the sticky phlegm out of his