Writers Writing Dying by C. K. Williams

Author:C. K. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466880658
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CRAZY

Wordsworth has crawled from his cradle to Hölderlin’s cradle to murmur in Hölderlin’s ear.

Wordsworth’s two weeks younger, but much farther advanced en route to the cruelties of art.

“Now believing,” he intones, “now disbelieving…” the nipple pops from Hölderlin’s lips,

and Wordsworth, gleeful, continues: “… perplexed with impulse, motive, right and wrong…”

“Wrong,” Hölderlin hears, stricken with realizing he should have stayed in the womb,

and, “Wrong,” begins his first poem, the one he won’t write—Don’t write! he sobs, already half mad.

I’m sobbing too nearly, because I can’t begin to fathom the glory of Hölderlin’s wild singing,

his “Gods Walking,” his “Patmos”—I was on Patmos, he never was, but I’ll never know his sublime isle.

Because I can’t read German, and Hölderlin’s genius isn’t there, except in his original tongue.

And neither is Schiller’s nor Goethe’s … Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pindar, the Dark Age Arabs and Jews.

Even gigantic Pushkin, though Nabokov dragged him over the cobbles to Nabokovian English …

Nobody’s there, it feels like, except Wordsworth, who drones mournfully into the cradle of my age.

He wants me to be not like Hölderlin, silent and wise and insane, but the way he himself was at the end,

stodgy, staid, spitting up the pabulum drool of his dotage, the fires out, the passion quenched.

And how avoid that worse-than-death doom when to help me are only the library of poems

I’ve devoured in English and French and the few others that make it across the language abyss?

Hymn to me, Hölderlin! Just tracing the words on the page I can tell how high is your flight!

Save me from my sublunary trudge, this monolingual Ferris wheel to which I’m condemned!

Let us be crazy together! Don’t leave me scrambling up those stanzas of inaccessible bliss!

Helfen Sie mir! or something. Something in Mandelstam’s Russian. Some baby babble. Some soar.

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