5 poems
THE ROCKS
These are the rocks
the long wave of you breaks on.
They don’t need you.
You are the wave that crests, crests,
rolls forward, breaking
of its own motion, a fringe of white,
but you are only you
in the moment the order buckles
on something other, something utter,
a destructive power of stillness,
and what you are bursts in sea-lit mist
all at once, and not at all, and the wave slides out.
MUSE
Wind in the fire garden.
Wordless phrase
the fire breathes.
*
Shapeless / seized
with shape
the fire finds
its dart, and pitch.
*
A wash of sky.
A waste of sky.
A fire. In the center.
*
(Empty motion of
mind making the sound
of fire).
*
O frame
and fire
my song.
ROBERT CREELEY
Twist first poetry
from smallest,
darkest words
into luminous,
glass-abstract
syllabic
distentio animi the
pulse tested stark
harmonies on
or against—
and the mind.
The old virtu one
makes, one
makes a-
new, in age as in
youth, fondly and
always
moving. Ways,
places . . .
edges are
useful, but
space is free,
color flares
in the eye,
the grass
is wet. Everything
restless
finds a way.
Yours
began in anger.
The truth gets
simpler, the
cost steeper,
the one dearer
who goes dark.
Whose ghost
evaporates in
a single
word, quick drop
of thirst . . .
Into the labyrinth
and
arduously
out. Breath wed
to breath. So
rest then
in the living
silence the song
gives way to, gives
of itself endlessly,
endlessly gives way.
INSOMNIAC
1
Sleep’s the sentence he
speaks to himself over
and over till it
loses all meaning, becomes
absurd, like
sleep, and he wakes.
2
He takes his waking
thought apart and
recombines it:
grotesques, creatures he
would have dreamt
had he been asleep.
3
He pictures himself as Krapp
or as Rousseau on his back
in the bottom of a boat
moving up and down and
side to side; wakes
to the sound of water.
4
Li Po fell out of his boat.
Elpenor fell out of his sleep.
Both men were drunk.
But the sleep in my veins is pure.
A CONSTELLATION
Some say Cygnus is Zeus disguised,
lying in wait for Leda;
some say it’s Orpheus
transformed, to be in the sky near his lyre.
(His severed head never floated
down the Hebrus, didn’t come to rest on Lesbos.
—Never gave oracles
Apollo never silenced.)
Some say Cygnus
was dear to Phaeton, some say he was
Phaeton’s brother who day after day dove
into the Eridanos looking for the boy’s body
after the holocaust Helios’ son
caused burned the world to ash,
till Zeus took pity and turned him into a swan.
What is it to grieve forever.
Stephen Williams is a poet living in Chicago. He edits Aurochs.