Sunday, August 15, 2010

"IX" by william carlos williams

What about all this writing?

O “Kiki”
O Miss Margaret Jarvis
The backhandspring

I: clean
clean
clean: yes . . New-York

Wrigley's, appendicitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup--

either that or a bullet!

Once
anything might have happened
you lay relaxed on my knees--
the starry night
spread out warm and blind
above the hospital--

Pah!

it is unclean
which is not straight to the mark--

in my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion--
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning--

what to want?

drunk we go forward surely
not i

beds, beds, beds
elevators, fruit, night-tables
breasts to see, white and blue--
to hold in the hand, to nozzle

it is not onion soup
your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces

everything
--windows, chairs
obscenely drunk, spinning--
white, blue, orange
--hot with our passion

wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air!

but what would you have?

all i said was:
there, you see, it is broken

stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, i wrapped myself round you--

i watched.

you sobbed, you beat your pillow
you tore your heair
you dug your nails into your sides

i was your nightgown
i watched!

clean is he alone
after whom stream

the broken pieces of the city--
flying apart at his approaches

but i merely
caress you curiously

fifteen years ago and you still
go about the city, they say
patching up sick school children

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