dear dr. Williams :: arial foundation park :: eclipse 2024
you push the plastic shades up your nose :: you plan to have fun and watch the sun :: the park is strangely buoyant :: the children float above the mounds :: their parents vibrate light :: you and your friend write poems while you wait :: this moment is a sign :: of what you are unsure :: it doesn’t matter :: it’s a sign and you are ribboned glass :: you both form a v in the grass :: the catholic in you always reads the signs :: and when the moon finally slides into place you marvel at its glass :: it feels wrong to stare as if death is the plan :: as if you are watching the end and everyone dies before they die again :: one minute is not nearly enough to read the signs :: the doctor in you is always reading the signs :: but you cannot escape your glass :: even the grass is screaming while the glass birds have fallen silent :: they too are reading the signs :: are you having fun yet? the glass in you is always reading the signs :: the cullets are pushing light like death except you remember the solid glass :: it’s a prism :: and when your friend breaks the v you keep surveillance on the moon as if it moves through fractured glass :: death is the plan you keep watching :: even when the sun appears you keep falling for the signs
dear dr. Williams: the filling station psychotherapist
you struggle for several minutes with the nozzle because the trigger is lodged in its groove :: the attendant watches sceptically but does not move from his booth :: it is a spiritual sin to mock his inspiration :: he’s empathetic when he hollers for you to drive to another fucking pump :: of course you do a u-ie :: why do you always struggle with reversing? of course the keypad isn’t working :: of course the display screen flickers :: crossed words :: of course you head inside :: cheque in hand and only 23.19 left in insight :: of course the attendant points to your leg :: his eyes locked on the tattoo :: what’s that? he asks :: his body planking upon the counter :: a lily, you reply :: ah yes, he says :: that must be your name :: yes, you nod :: you lay your hand upon the counter :: yes :: the form of your speech holds the dynamic of meaning :: what is it he says next that invents inspiration? is it a recognition? you will have to write about it later :: this moment :: the awe :: the memory is always far richer than its image :: stay awhile lily, he says :: there is so much he would like to talk about
dear dr. Williams :: to Marcia
you unfairly label the poet a poet when she gently corrects your letters :: the stroke has warped your signature :: she has become your hand :: isn’t she your final editor, after all? the editing is the writing :: the extension of your poem :: editing is a woman, you reason :: and in the end you take your weary way as best you can :: you hope for the best :: never mind the success of her complaints :: that you abandoned the poet while she was in hospital after a major operation :: if you are bothered, you refuse to show it :: you invent a poem far richer than any given thing :: what is that thing? a hallucination :: a delusion :: a feeling experienced when you drive home late at night after class and the streetlights are out :: the car shudders and you think oh my god you hit something :: is it a dog a cat a racoon a skunk? whatever it is you continue down the road until the guilt finally overwhelms you :: it is logical that you swing the vehicle around and return to the site of your murder :: you are relieved to find that it is not a dog, a cat, a racoon or a skunk but a pothole :: the guilt of your words will cause more wounds than you can imagine :: your faults are too liverish :: too grey :: you will never shake the feeling :: the world is in a perilous state, you think :: you will never invert that phrase unless it lies in your power :: don’t do it :: no matter how the line sounds :: you always imagine strange scenarios like this pothole :: the dissolution of your faith always compels a return to the site of the disaster :: of course, it is just a pothole :: just as you are a stupid animal :: excellence in the imagination is the prerogative of your mind :: it is easy to go mad in Rutherford as it is in Mount Vernon :: that’s the poem you think :: the rest of it is yours
dear dr. Williams: you look well
you can tell by the error that you are frustrated :: that this aging body leaves its betrayals in the aas and the esses and strange cases :: recall how that one colleague goes to the gym because—as they tell you—they are committed to decaying slowly :: for your part you have decided to accelerate towards a crisis :: the world is in a perilous state :: who said you have brain damage :: it’s COVID, you think :: everyone is sick :: everyone says you LOOK wonderful and the mirror seems to verify it but your feet and the insides of your head have given you the lie :: you are fortunate :: your typewriter or phone or computer or pen approximates your body :: some kin of extension :: of space time and mind :: it gives you a sense of control when everything is falling apart :: but you refuse to lose faith :: you can still use the left hand to type an occasional poem :: you can still bend your body toward a luxuriant gender :: how strange you think that you should have gone to bed together :: but everything is also going well :: the doctor already said it is a miracle that any of us are alive
dear dr. Williams: grief pastoral
you know the deer are determined :: they grief the bird feeder intimately :: their appetite astonishes even you :: they always take more no matter how much seed you lay out :: good grief :: even the squirrels abide at the periphery of the skeleton tree holding onto dear life :: the deer dare the grief of your watching :: the bulldozers in the clearing :: forget the robins :: the cuckoo :: the hawk :: the crow :: they have found another place to sing :: your grief taps the window :: but deer insist on feeding :: with you here enduring by the window :: listening for an angry robin :: chasing the uncut seed to feed its grief
dear dr. Williams : from the critic :: wheel-bearings [sinantherina socialis]
you hold your tongue but listen :: sex is expressed in sound and gossip is infrastructure in this colony :: the waterbees fight for the stone of this flower and you are prone to random cleaving :: you are cosmopolitan :: you have a need to be the sole source :: you have a need for cruel distortion of this ooze the poets call water :: you desire to be the definition :: but you are too ganglion to define tradition :: the gloopy slime of the pond will ensnare any wheel who dares to follow your motor :: should you spin to a new water column the currents will shear your delicate toes :: but who knows :: maybe the larvae will follow
Note
Since 2023, an archival impulse has drawn me to the University of Buffalo Special Collections and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where I have explored the correspondences between various modernist poets, including Williams, for a separate project. I found myself especially mesmerised by the dramas contained in Williams’ private letters. He was highly attuned to his community, its people, and the soap-operatic lives of poets. His letters also reflected issues that continue to circulate today: Williams expressed anxieties about his personal identity, war, income disparities, and the state of healthcare, among many others. I felt moved to write on the parallels between his time and ours in a new manuscript-in-progress titled the gravity of letters in measures.
These epistles employ techniques such as the ambiguous “you,” which slips between Williams and a persona, textual collage, and scientific metaphors to collapse a sense of time and place. I am less interested in the adage “history repeats,” which, I think, forecloses any intellectual inquiry as to why? Rather, I want to focus on the stakes in living well against social and political violence. Cultivating a shared space, where thrivance and poetry can intertwine, is, perhaps the heartful growl at the centre of these poems.