The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams by Tennessee Williams

Author:Tennessee Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-04-26T18:11:51+00:00

The Rented Room

‘Sorry but I’m not in the nursing profession, old man,’

said my young companion as he slammed out of our rented room

a little before noon this morning.

It was the patience with which he had waited as long as he’d waited

to remove himself from the tedium of attendance upon an aging man’s

chronic disorders that afterwards dismayed me, not his

despairing of an improved situation in the room.

But I was now alone in it,

I was alone in the room, and

As the day went on, it shrivelled and dimmed about me, that rented room

into which time had finally led me from more spacious quarters.

I lay on the unmade bed all day, now and then reaching a hand out to his

vacant pillow.

When the single window’s rectangle of light dimmed out,

sleep took me away.

◆ ◆ ◆

At first I thought he had reappeared in a dream, not that he had actually,

for some inconceivable reason, come back into the room.

‘Stephen! Is that you?’

‘Who else were you expecting here, old man?’

‘Nobody, nobody, Stephen, but least of all you.’

He didn’t turn on the light in the room but a yellowish glow

was admitted by a dusty glass transom over the door,

and in that glow I watched him removing his clothes,

not quickly nor slowly but at the usual measured pace.

Dimly light showed him at moments as he moved back and forth,

till his flesh, now unclothed, flickered as coins of gold:

I didn’t stir, I hardly dared breathe on the bed.

I don’t think he looked my way until he fell beside me

as a bouquet of flowers thrown.

‘Are you thirsty?’ he whispered.

I couldn’t answer.

He pressed a beer can to my lips and it was still cool.

I drank a bit of it, but most spilled down my chin and he wiped it off

very gently with his fingers.

A midnight bell, distant, possibly not in the bell-tower of

a cathedral,

Summoned me to worship. . . .

It was the next morning, I think,

that I moved out of my worn habitation of flesh,

and speak of this now in the whisper of a ghost

the flickering fragments of gold that the transom light

gave to my life’s rented bedroom.

So little is so much and is finally all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.