Free Collected Poems by C. K. Williams

words to his kids, words even to god so our lord
    is over his eyes and our father over his belly and the history of madness and history of cliffs;
    the way there’s no room now, the way every word in the world has stuck to the skin
    and is used up now, and his eyes move, roll, spin up to the top of his head
    the way the eyes of those fish who try to see god or the lid of the water roll, like dice,
    so me, within me again: I cover myself with my own scrawl and wait in the shallow,
    I face the shallow and wait like a fin and I ripple the membrane of scrawl like water;
    so me, we, dear life I love you where are you, so we, dear our lord of anguish where are you,
    so zero, so void; we don’t even know how to end it, how to get out of the way of the serif or slash.
    And the next, and the next, the way the next, the way all, any, any he, any she,
    any human or less or more, if not bone that leaps with its own word then still more,
    if not skin that washes its own wound then more and more, the way more than a wound,
    more than a thing which has to be spoken or born, born now, later, again,
    the way desire is born and born, the desire within me and not, within and without and neither;
    the way the next holds on to itself and the one after holds on to me, on to my person, my human,
    and I give back, the way ten times a day I offer it back with love or resentment or horror,
    so I bear my likeness and greet my like, and the way will, my will or not,
    the way all it can say is I am or am not, or I don’t, won’t, cannot or will not,
    and the way that it burns anyway, and the way it smiles, smiles anyway, fills, ripens,
    so that the hour or the scrawl burns and ripens; so within me, as though I had risen,
    as though I had gone to the gate and opened the lock and stepped through;
    so within me, it lifts and goes through, lifts itself through, and burns, anyway, smiles, anyway.

Bob
    If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to hear every imaginable kind of bullshit.
    Every long-time loser has a history to convince you he isn’t living at the end of his own leash
    and every kid has some pimple on his psyche he’s trying to compensate for with an epic,
    but the person with the most unlikely line I’d ever heard — he told me he’d killed, more than a few times,
    during the war and then afterwards working for the mob in Philadelphia — I could never make up my mind about.
    He was big, bigger than big. He’d also been drinking hard and wanted to be everyone’s friend
    and until the bartender called the cops because he wouldn’t stop stuffing money in girls’ blouses,
    he gave me his life: the farm childhood, the army, re-upping, the war — that killing —
    coming back and the new job — that killing — then almost being killed himself by another hood and a kind of pension,
    a distributorship, incredibly enough, for hairdresser supplies in the ward around Passyunk and Mifflin.
    He left before the cops came, and before he left he shook my hand and looked into my eyes.
    It’s impossible to tell how much that glance weighed: it was like having to lift something,
    something so ponderous and unwieldy that you wanted to call for someone to help you
    and when he finally turned away, it wouldn’t have bothered me at all if I’d never seen him again.
    This is going to get a little nutty now, maybe because everything was a little nutty for me back then.
    Not a little. I’d been doing some nice refining. No work, no woman, hardly any friends left.
    The details don’t matter. I was helpless, self-pitying, angry, inert, and right now
    I was flying to Detroit to interview for a job I knew I wouldn’t get. Outside,
    the clouds were packed against our windows and just as I let my book drop to look out,
    we broke through into a sky so brilliant that I had to close my eyes against the glare.
    I stayed like that, waiting for the stinging after-light to fade, but it seemed to pulse instead,
    then suddenly it washed