Collected Poems by Williams C. K

Author:Williams, C. K. [Williams, C. K.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466880573
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-09-08T22:00:00+00:00

Scar

As though the skin had been stripped and pulled back onto the skull like a stocking and soldered

too tightly so that it mottled to yellow and ocher, the pores and follicles thumbed out of the clay

by the furious slash of flame that must have leapt on her and by the healing that hurt her —

if it is healing that leaves her, age three, in a lassitude lax on her mother’s broad lap,

bleak, weary, becalmed, what’s left of her chin leaned heavily onto what’s left of her fingers,

those knobs without nails, diminished, blunted, as though someone had hammered them thicker;

nares gone, ears gone, most of the dear lips gone so that your gaze is taken too deeply, terribly,

into the pool of the mouth as into a genital; the eyelids upper and lower wrinkled like linen,

the blood rims of the eyes too graphically vivid; harsh, tearless, pornographically red —

and you are supposed not to look or look and glance quickly away and not look at the mother,

who signs with a stone shoulder and eyes fixed to the child’s white-gauze surgical cap

that if you do look you are cursed, if you do look you will and you well know it be damned.

Lascivious pity, luxurious pity, that glances and looks and looks twice and delivers the tear

and hauls out of the blind, locked caves of the breast these silent strangles of sobs

that ache but give something like tremulous whispers of sanctity back, psalms of gratification.

Lascivious pity, idle, despicable pity, pity of the reflexive half-thought holy thought

thinking the mindless threnody of itself once again: I watched, I couldn’t not watch her,

as she so conscientiously, carefully wouldn’t watch me; rapacious, pillaging pity: forgive me.

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