C.K. WILLIAMS

From Some of the Forms of Jealousy

Signs

My friend’s wife has a lover; I come to this conclusion-not suspicion,
mind, conclusion,
not a doubt about it, not a hesitation, although how I get there might
be hard to track;
a blink a little out of phase, say, with its sentence, perhaps a word or
two too few;
a certain tenderness of atmosphere, of aura, almost like a pregnancy,
with less glow perhaps,
but similar complex inward blushes of accomplishment, achievement,
pride—during dinner,
as she passes me a dish of something, as I fork a morsel of it off, as our
glances touch.

My friend’s manner, or his guise, is openness, heartiness and healthy
haleness in all things;
the virtue of conviction, present moment, that sort of thing, it is his
passion and his ethic,
so I don’t know now if he knows or doesn’t know, or knows and might
be hiding it, or doesn’t care.
He is hearty, open, present; he is eating dinner in the moment with his
wife and dear old friend.
The wife, wifely, as she pours my wine and hand it to me looks across
the glass’s rim at me.
Something in that wifely glance tells me now she knows I know, and
when I shyly look away,
reach across for some bread and butter, she looks down at my hand, and up
again: she is telling me
she doesn’t care the least bit if I know or don’t know, she might in fact
wish me to know.

My friend is in the present still, taking sustenance; It’s sustaining, good;
he smiles, good.
Down below, I can just make out the engines of his ship, the stresses,
creaks and groans;
everything’s in hand; I hear the happy workers at their chugging furnaces
and boilers.
I let my friend’s guise now not be my guise, but truth; in truth, I’m like
him, dense, convinced,
involved all in the moment, hearty, filled, fulfilled, not just with manner,
but with fact.
I ply my boilers, too; my workers hum: light the deck lamps, let the string
quartet play.

My friend’s wife smiles and offers me her profile now; she is telling me
again: but why?
My friend doesn’t seem to see me resonating; he grins, I grin too, I flee
to see him again.
I’m with him in his moment now, I’m in my mouth just as he’s in his,
munching, hungrily, heartily.
My safe and sane and hungry mouth hefts the morsels of my sustenance
across its firmament.
The wife smiles yet again, I smile, too, but what I’m saying is if what
she means is so,
I have no wish to know; more, I never did know; more, if by any chance
I might have known,
I’ve forgotten, absolutely, yes: if it ever did come into my mind it’s slipped
my mind. In truth, I don’t remember anything; I eat, I drink, I smile; I hardly even know I’m there.

Even if a Could

Except for the little girl
making faces behind me, and the rainbow
behind her, and the school and the truck,
the only thing between you
and infinity
is me. Which is why you cover your ears
when I speak and why
you’re always oozing round the edges,
clinging, trying
to go by me.

And except for my eyes and the back
of my skull, and then my hair,
the wall, the concrete
and the fire-cloud, except for them
you would see
God. And that’s why rage howls in your arms
like a baby and why I can’t move-
becaukse of the thunder and the shadows
merging like oil and the smile gleaming
through the petals.

Let me tell you how sick with loneliness
I am. What can I do while the distance
throbs on my back like a hump,
or say, with stars stinging me
through the wheel? You are before me,
behind me things rattle their deaths out
like paper. The angels ride
in their soft saddles:
except for them, I would come closer
and go.

Symbols

1/Wind

Night, a wildly lashing deluge driving in great gusts over the blind,
defeated fields,
the usually stoical larches and pines only the mewling of their suddenly
maleable branches;
a wind like a knife that never ceased shreiking except during the stun-
ning volley of thunder.

By morning, half the hundred pullets in the henhouse had massed in
a corner and smothered,
an inert, intricate structure of dulled irridescense and still-distracted, still-
frenzied eyes,
the vivid sapphire of daybreak tainted by a vaporous, gorge-swelling fetor.

The tribe of survivors compulsively hammered their angular faces as
usual into the trough:
nothing in the world, they were saying, not carnage or dissolution, can
bear reflection;
the simplest acts of being, they were saying, can obliterate all, all mad-
ness, all mourning.