Williams started to use his long, rangy, capacious line in With Ignorance (1977) and then perfected it in Tar (1983). He had become a storyteller, which is to say that he borrowed some devices from narrative fiction to build anecdotes into stories and make keen social observations. He also used the line as a container for consciousness, for observing people in social situations, usually doing something outrageous, sometimes unwillingly, and often breaking a public norm. There’s an element of voyeurism in his poems. He was watchful and often caught himself in the act of seeing something that he shouldn’t be seeing. He observed others doing the same thing. He was willing to confront hard truths—about himself as well as others—and his poems can be discomfiting to read. He said, “Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.”
That clear-eyed view especially relates to the poem “From My Window,” the opening gambit in Tar:
From My Window
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,
complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying
in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way
are budded—I hadn’t noticed—
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken
the gritty soil.
Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left
and right the way they do.
A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing
hooky, I imagine,
and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted
warehouse down the block
and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come
weaving towards me,
their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the
sidewalk to the other.
I know where they’re going—to the “Legion”: once, when I was
putting something out, they stopped,
both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn’t ten o’clock—and
we chatted for a bit.
I don’t know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder
if they’re lovers?
They don’t look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening
haphazardly along,
contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so
that the chair skewers, teeters,
tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding
in stages from his seat,
his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him,
spinning heavily down,
to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and
fruitlessly against the curb.
In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have
come to see the show.
Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they’re not, at least,
thank god, laughing.
Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands
there for a moment, panting.
Now he has to lift the other one, who lies utterly still, a forearm
shielding his eyes from the sun.
He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into
the chair but a dangling foot
catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to
put him down,
set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the
grimy jeans right off him.
No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils
of belly blubber,
the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the
sparse genital hair,
then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he
were, at last, to be let be,
and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at
me as though he’d known,
all along, that I was watching and I can’t help wondering if he knows
that in the winter, too,
I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather,
almost ran, for how many hours.
It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when
the storm takes hold,
and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then
realized made a figure eight,
what must have been to him a perfect symmetry, but which, from
where I was, shivered, bent,
and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow
came faster, going out.
Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path
he’d blazed,
but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them
now and I looked away,
up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some,
though it was midnight,
with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons
signaling erratically
against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions
of the dim, milky sky.
In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure
white,
its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique,
relentless, unadorned.
The narrator begins by setting a city scene: it’s the end of winter, the first real morning of spring, and he keeps coming back to the window to drink it all in. Williams uses three adjectives—“sweet,” “laminar” (a word borrowed from physics, as in a laminar flow, to suggest a constant nonturbulent stream), and “complex”—to describe the scent coming from somewhere to the west. The narrator seems newly awake and observes that the sycamores have now budded (“I hadn’t noticed”). The natural scene alerts him to what is unfolding below—the surveyors, the girl in a gym suit, some kids passing by, probably skipping school, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet and his friend weaving unsteadily from one side of the sidewalk to the other. He knows where they are going—to the “Legion”—and how they get drunk in the morning. He doesn’t speculate, but the vet in a wheelchair is probably suffering from some form of posttraumatic stress disorder. The speaker is curious about the two of them (“I wonder if they’re lovers?” he idly speculates) and how they manage to survive, probably “on benefits.”
The main action of the poem is the untoward accident that takes place in the street below, the vet in a wheelchair tumbling to the ground, his friend staggering over him. The narrator of the poem observes what is happening to them through a window, which, as in Cavafy’s poem “The God Abandons Antony,” serves as a sharp transition point between inside and outside. But here the narrator has a sort of double consciousness. He is not only witnessing what is going on in the street below but also notices two other people, Reed and his son, who are likewise observing, from their storefront window, what has become a “show.” Oddly, they see everything through the lettering of their names, a curious, privileged position. Everyone is separated by glass; no one can hear what anyone else is saying. Williams’s narrator is looking down, and the others are looking out at the spectacle. What happens next is painful: the vet’s friend inadvertently pulls off the crippled man’s pants and everyone sees the “blotchy thighs” and the “poor, blunt pud.” The narrator can’t look away but can’t bear the exposure either, and yet he can’t deny it is happening because Reed and Son are also seeing precisely what he is seeing. And then the man in the street, the vet’s friend, looks up and sees the narrat
or observing it all from the window above. He watches him watching. Those indoors and outdoors are locked in a shameful moment that feels endless. The narrator can’t avoid the fact that he has become a guilty spectator to another person’s suffering.
And then the poem moves to the memory of the night that the speaker saw the vet’s friend—he isn’t given a name—going out and making a figure eight in the snow. That night the narrator became an unintended witness to the small drama of a person trying to make a mark in a snowfall that was quickly erasing it. The poem has thus moved from a new morning to the memory of night.
The narrator finds something sacred in the scene and remembers “the city in that holy silence, the last we have.” He can’t help noticing the difference in perspectives. Whereas the man in the snow probably thinks he is making a figure with perfect symmetry, the observer above sees that it is flawed, “shivered, bent”—“a warped, unclear infinity.” That’s the view at ground level. But the narrator has a more elevated view. Notice how he looks up over “the skeletal trees” to the lights gleaming in some Center City buildings, even at midnight, which, as we have seen from other poems, almost always signals an epiphany. The lights are a naturalistic detail, but the light itself is not natural. Standing at the window at midnight, he is also standing on the threshold between one day and the next, the inner and outer worlds, earth and heaven. In many visionary poems, such as W. B. Yeats’s “All Souls’ Night” (“Midnight has come”) and Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” the midnight hour is symbolically clear and almost transparent, not cloudy or obscure, and signals a kind of commerce between this world and the next. But Williams’s narrator has a much more mixed view. He views the gleaming lights as “scarlet warning beacons signaling erratically,” as if their “smoldering auras” are somehow a warning of the ruthless natural force coming down at us from “the dim, milky sky.” For a moment the two figures in this poem, one down below in the snow, one standing above at the window, are alone in the universe.
It’s a fleeting revelation. The narrator recalls that on the following morning, all traces of the man in the snow have been effaced; the cold, clear, glittering field is unmarked, “pure white.” Once more Williams employs three surprising adjectives—“oblique” (not straightforward), “relentless” (unabated), and “unadorned” (plain and simple) to describe the dawn. He also presses the consonants gl in the last line (“glittering,” “glancing,” “glaze”) to suggest the almost incandescent, angular, shining light of the new day. The narrator of C. K. Williams’s vigilant poem finds himself staring into a beauteous oblivion.
Louise Glück
* * *
“Night Song”
(1983)
Throughout her fierce and unsparing fourth book, The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Louise Glück treats the sexual desire to lose the self to another as an erotic version of the longing for oblivion and death, a joyous illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. She poses that longing against artistic consciousness, the desire to leave behind “exact records.” Lovers have a deep-seeded need to try to merge and become one, but it comes at a high cost—the loss of consciousness, of self. Here is “Night Song,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1983 and was subsequently published as the fifth section of her nine-part sequence, “Marathon,” in The Triumph of Achilles.
Night Song
Look up into the light of the lantern.
Don’t you see? The calm of darkness
is the horror of Heaven.
* * *
We’ve been apart too long, too painfully separated.
How can you bear to dream,
to give up watching? I think you must be dreaming,
your face is full of mild expectancy.
* * *
I need to wake you, to remind you that there isn’t a future.
That’s why we’re free. And now some weakness in me
has been cured forever, so I’m not compelled
to close my eyes, to go back, to rectify—
* * *
The beach is still; the sea, cleansed of its superfluous life,
opaque, rocklike. In mounds, in vegetal clusters,
seabirds sleep on the jetty. Terns, assassins—
* * *
You’re tired; I can see that.
We’re both tired, we have acted a great drama.
Even our hands are cold, that were like kindling.
Our clothes are scattered on the sand; strangely enough,
they never turned to ashes.
* * *
I have to tell you what I’ve learned, that I know now
what happens to the dreamers.
They don’t feel it when they change. One day
they wake, they dress, they are old.
* * *
Tonight I’m not afraid
to feel the revolutions. How can you want sleep
when passion gives you that peace?
You’re like me tonight, one of the lucky ones.
You’ll get what you want. You’ll get your oblivion.
It’s as if we are overhearing an extremely personal, albeit one-sided conversation, a monologue so ardent that it wants to rise above speech, to become a song. It hits a heightened pitch, like a nocturne, and presents a night scene, an all-night vigil. This is a sort of counterpart poem to Stephen Berg’s “On This Side of the River,” where a gruelingly self-conscious male speaker addresses his sleeping female lover. In “Night Song,” a hypervigilant female speaker dramatically addresses her sleeping male lover. But whereas Berg’s poem has a distinctly urban milieu, the two figures in Glück’s poem seem to have gone to a cabin by the sea, far from the lights of the city.
It’s late at night. The speaker’s tone is urgent, her voice low, reckless, intent: “Look up into the light of the lantern,” she tells him. The liquid l ’s link the three words—“Look,” “light,” “lantern”—and help emphasize the command to see. The lantern is a realistic detail, but it is also a metaphor for the solitary light of consciousness. This is reminiscent of a moment in an elegy by the Czech poet, Jiří Orten, where he states outright: “Now, when everything’s running short, / I can’t stand being here by myself. The lamplight’s too strong.”
The second line kicks off with a question: “Don’t you see?” Here the emphasis can fall on any one of the three words: “Don’t you see?”; “Don’t you see?”; “Don’t you see?” The speaker is more alert than her sleeping lover. She seems impatient with him for dropping off to sleep and leaving her awake and alone with her insights.
The speaker’s next thought is unexpected. She is sounding a warning to her lover—she can’t understand why he doesn’t also recognize that “The calm of darkness / is the horror of Heaven.” The line break emphasizes the calmness of darkness, and the h sound presses together the unlikely pairing of “horror” and “Heaven.” The word “Heaven” is capitalized, as it is here, only when referring to the dwelling place of the Lord. The promise of an afterlife is usually thought of as reassuring, but for Glück’s speaker it is appalling because it means mortal death, the end of time.
The lovers are exhausted, spent, cold. The specifics of their situation are sketchy, but we infer from the previous parts of the sequence that they have come together after a long and possibly final absence, remembered their severed past, acted their parts in a “great drama,” made love as if stamping or branding each other’s bodies. Now while one sleeps and dreams—expectant, oblivious—the other keeps herself awake by talking to him with a passionate, perhaps even terrified intensity, telling him what she has learned, bringing him her news, her argument. In the first sentence, the word “apart” opens up into the word “separated,” and the speaker presses down on the adverb “too”:
We’ve been apart too long, too painfully separated.
How can you bear to dream,
to give up watching? I think you must be dreaming,
your face is full of mild expectancy.
*
* *
I need to wake you, to remind you that there isn’t a future.
That’s why we’re free. And now some weakness in me
has been cured forever, so I’m not compelled
to close my eyes, to go back, to rectify—
Glück poses the difference between sleeping and waking as an opposition between clarity and dreaming, consciousness and forgetfulness, living in the present moment against expecting a future. The speaker’s vigilant intensity, her doomed foreknowledge, is contrasted to her lover’s mildness, his escape from consciousness, his faith in a future that she believes doesn’t exist. We’re free precisely because we don’t have any expectations of time. We must watch ourselves in the moment, she seems to be telling him; we must live inside it. The speaker has cured herself of what she calls a weakness, a need to go back over the past, to correct things. She is frustrated with her lover for sleeping, which seems like an escape. Consciousness is the only weapon against an oblivion that separately will be claiming each of us.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 27
