Poems by William Carlos WilliamsA middle-northern March, now as always--
gusts from the South broken against cold winds--
Go to sleep--though of course you will not--
to tideless waves thundering slantwise against
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
If you had come away with me
into another state
we had been quiet together.
But there the sun coming up
I gotta
buy me a new
girdle.
(I'll buy
you one) O.K.
(I wish
you'd wig-
gle that way
for me,
I'd be
a happy man)
I GOTTA
And yet one arrives somehow,
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom--
feels the autumn
A day on the boulevards chosen out of ten years of
student poverty! One best day out of ten good ones.
Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down --
the blizzard
drifts its weight
I stopped the car
to let the children down
where the streets end
in the sun
at the marsh edge
and the reeds begin
They call me and I go.
It is a frozen road
past midnight, a dust
of snow caught
in the rigid wheeltracks.
The door opens.
It was an icy day.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set fire to it
in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha! Spring is
gone down in purple,
weeds stand high in the corn,
the rainbeaten furrow
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
This plot of ground
facing the waters of this inlet
is dedicated to the living presence of
Emily Dickinson Wellcome
An old willow with hollow branches
slowly swayed his few high gright tendrils
and sang:
Love is a young green willow
Lady of dusk-wood fastnesses,
Thou art my Lady.
I have known the crisp, splintering leaf-tread with thee on before,
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
One leaves his leaves at home
beomg a mullen and sends up a lighthouse
to peer from: I will have my way,
Gagarin says, in ecstasy,
he could have
gone on forever
he floated
at and sang
and when he emerged from that
The coroner's merry little children
Have such twinkling brown eyes.
Their father is not of gay men
The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return
from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
I
I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them:
You sullen pig of a man
you force me into the mud
with your stinking ash-cart!
Brother!
--if we were rich
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
The birches are mad with green points
the wood's edge is burning with their green,
burning, seething--No, no, no.
Light hearted William twirled
his November moustaches
and, half dressed, looked
from the bedroom window
I lie here thinking of you:---
the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
I
Winter is long in this climate
and spring--a matter of a few days
only,--a flower or two picked
You say love is this, love is that:
Poplar tassels, willow tendrils
the wind and the rain comb,
There is a bird in the poplars!
It is the sun!
The leaves are little yellow fish
swimming in the river.
Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow
changed by white curtains ?
Smell of cleanliness ?
They tell me on the morrow I must leave
This winter eyrie for a southern flight
And truth to tell I tremble with delight
Men with picked voices chant the names
of cities in a huge gallery: promises
that pull through descending stairways
The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement
quarreling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
The Archer is wake!
The Swan is flying!
Gold against blue
An Arrow is lying.
There is hunting in heaven--
Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am,
by what devious means do you contrive
to remain idle? Teach me, O master.
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow!
It is not a color.
It is summer!
It is the wind on a willow,
the lap of waves, the shadow
Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth--nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
Tracks of rain and light linger in
the spongy greens of a nature whose
flickering mountain--bulging nearer,
Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
Mr T.
bareheaded
in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
on all sides
stood on his toes
heels together
arms gracefully
The world begins again!
Not wholly insufflated
the blackbirds in the rain
upon the dead topbranches
of the living tree,
It is cold. The white moon
is up among her scattered stars--
like the bare thighs of
the Police Sergeant's wife--among
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
A three-day-long rain from the east--
an terminable talking, talking
of no consequence--patter, patter, patter.
Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and --
In the tall, dried grasses
Upon the table in their bowl
in violent disarray
of yellow sprays, green spikes
of leaves, red pointed petals
I feel the caress of my own fingers
on my own neck as I place my collar
and think pityingly
of the kind women I have known.
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
In the flashes and black shadows
of July
the days, locked in each other's arms,
seem still
so that squirrels and colored birds
When I am alone I am happy.
The air is cool. The sky is
flecked and splashed and wound
with color. The crimson phalloi
It is a willow when summer is over,
a willow by the river
from which no leaf has fallen nor
bitten by the sun
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
I bought a dishmop--
having no daughter--
for they had twisted
fine ribbons of shining copper
about white twine
