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William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
You may get the following on this page:
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air -- The edge
cuts without cutting
meets -- nothing -- renews
itself in metal or porcelain --
whither? It ends --
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry --
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica --
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses --
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end -- of roses
It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness -- fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact -- lifting
from it -- neither hanging
nor pushing --
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chicken
(Webmaster's ever favorite -- probably the only one that he knows by heart.)
When I am alone I am happy.
The air is cool. The sky is
flecked and splashed and wound
with color. The crimson phalloi
of the sassafras leaves
hang crowded before me
in shoals on the heavy branches.
When I reach my doorstep
I am greeted by
the happy shrieks of my children
and my heart sinks.
I am crushed.
Are not my children as dear to me
as falling leaves or
must one become stupid
to grow older?
It seems much as if Sorrow
had tripped up my heels.
Let us see, let us see!
What did I plan to say to her
when it should happen to me
as it has happened now?
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose was they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prances as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
Without other cost than breath
and the poor soul,
carried in the cage of the ribs,
chirping shrilly
I walked in the garden. The
garden smelled of roses.
The lilies' green throats opened
to yellow trumpets
that craved no sound and the rain
was fresh in my face,
the air a sweet breath.
Yesterday
the heat was oppressive
dust clogged the leaves' green
and bees from
the near hive, parched, drank,
overeager, at
the birdbath and were drowned there.
Others replaced them
from which the birds were
frightened
-- the fleece-light air!
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