SPRING AND ALL XI by William Carlos Williams

Tags

1923, 7*, balcony, blue, boy, car, driving, face, girl, house, laughing, law, leg, looking, man, mind, no-mind, passing, roads, smile, travelling, watch, William Carlos Williams, woman

                XI

                In passing with my mind
                on nothing in the world

                but the right of way
                I enjoy on the road by

                virtue of the law–
                I saw

                an elderly man who
                smiled and looked away

                to the north past a house–
                a woman in blue

                who was laughing and
                leaning forward to look up

                into the man’s half
                averted face

                and a boy of eight who was
                looking at the middle of

                the man’s belly
                at a watchchain–

                The supreme importance
                of this nameless spectacle

                sped me by them
                without a word–

                Why bother where I went?
                for I went spinning on the

                four wheels of my car
                along the wet road until

                I saw a girl with one leg
                over the rail of a balcony

 

from Spring and All, 1923; “In passing with my mind …”, the perfect beginning, middle and end of a poem; I read this when I was younger, possibly a bit impatient that I wanted something more to happen to call it a happening and also a little annoyed at the snagged details in passing thinking them too particular to so little that was happening … but I liked it; and this liking slipped in between my pomposity and fussiness and worked its way out over following decades through poems exploring this same sense of passing not being the start of something and its almost immediate dissolution, but its almost-not-being-there being its universal reality: vivid, important and sufficient unto itself – “the supreme importance / of this nameless spectacle”; it wasn’t until later I read more of the text in which WCW embedded these poems, raised beds, nonetheless, with earth so finely nourished and turned over that you could sink your fist into it up to your elbow: “When in the condition of imaginative suspense only will the writing have reality … Not to attempt, at that time, to set values on the word being used, according to presupposed measures, but to write down that which happens at that time / To perfect the ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives, to practise skill in recording the force moving, then to know it, in the largeness of its proportions …”

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blue wormhole: SPRING AND ALL I by William Carlos Williams
girl wormhole: ash leaves
house wormhole: presence
looking & travelling wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
mind wormhole: glamour of saṃsāra
passing & roads wormhole: La Route de Louveciennes, 1870
smile wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Pigs
William Carlos Williams wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
woman wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold

 

ash leaves

Tags

2017, 6*, advertising, afternoon, ash tree, branches, cars, girl, hair, head, nose, phone, portrait, reflection, Rome, sitting, speaking, sun, taxi, windows

                sat on the ledge of a display window
                in the via Germanico, she turned her head

                to speak on her phone, for the sun
                to light her half-forehead, her nose, her lip,

                while the old man wiped his car down
                with a wet rag; the girl – now looked

                at her text? – and grown a pony tail
                in her reflection, watched the taxi

                reverse across an open parking space
                with two antennae at the rear

                of the roof aligned under low-hanging
                branches of jagged ash leaves

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

afternoon wormhole: low afternoon
branches wormhole: letting them go
cars wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
girl wormhole: and // do your ears burn red?
hair wormhole: … the underleaves show
reflection wormhole: chuckling
sun wormhole: breakfast
windows wormhole: tram

 

and // do your ears burn red?

Tags

2015, 5*, blond, clothes, dark, ears, eating, face, girl, hands, hotel, identity, kitchen, life, night, passing, red, sweat, Sylvia Plath, talking, time, twilight, water, writing

                and do your ears burn red, or do you,
                washing dishes, with those same clothes
                rotting under your armpits, still talk
                about visigoths to your pathetic self

                and divine nothing?   I put you in a book,
                because a girl with blond hair told me
                about you one night eating grapes in the
                twilight kitchen, the planes of her face

                growing darker; two years ago, with those
                same clothes, stood in the doorway of the
                old hotel watching a girl named Ann, with
                wet hair walk beside Lake George; acrid,

                now, with the stench of dried sweat and
                your long black hair, your hands puffed
                and creased from the hot water; tell me,
                do your ears burn red?

 

bevelled up into bas-relief out of entry 120. of The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

girl wormhole: snapshots about Totnes
hands wormhole: place
hotel wormhole: constant hummm
identity & life wormhole: looking back over the tack / and jibe of my life I / notice there is / a fetch // after all … / but certainly not / where I had planned / or where I thought / I’d been
kitchen wormhole: out
night wormhole: humm
passing wormhole: passing
red wormhole: Bexhill 140215
Sylvia Plath wormhole: at table 21 in the garden centre thinking to / replicate Hughes’ exercise for Plath about / the Yew Tree
talking wormhole: Cocktails in 1951
time wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
twilight wormhole: good going into / that gentle night
water wormhole: all the sandstone / reflections in the / marble-blue troughs
writing wormhole: found

 

snapshots about Totnes

Tags

2015, 4*, bench, child, doors, flower, girl, hill, legs, lintel, looking, mauve, portrait, streets, Totnes, walls

                snapshots about Totnes

                girl with legs and shorts
                looks at me with lintels

                roadside wall holds mauve
                flower and steppe of land

                door-line out of street with
                hill by access ramp and rail

                kid hangs from the playship
                prow almost fell mum’s

                friend on the bench points
                her foot but doesn’t smile

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

bench wormhole: Day Out
child wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
doors wormhole: red / lacquer / door
girl wormhole: reating & wriding
looking wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
mauve wormhole: immeasurable love
streets wormhole: city streets
walls wormhole: slightly / uphill

 

reating & wriding

Tags

2014, 5*, beauty, being, boy, breathing, girl, grass, irony, Lewes, listening, phone, reading, talking, words, writing

                                reating & wriding

                                in
                through the words to the being
                out from the being between
                                words

                                why
                isn’t there beauty that can talk
                in locus and suffusion
                un-trapped in seem and word

                                even

                                even this
                has never existed

                                because
                the girl sat on the lawn and
                made her soliloquy
                                whatever

                                to the boy
                (who had the boxers who had the phone
                 and the tattoos and was not afraid
                 to sit on the grass and use them) who listened
                to every meaningful judder of her low cut top

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

beauty wormhole: weight
being wormhole: the sitting room
breathing wormhole: breathing through hypnagogia
girl wormhole: and I lose sight of her into memory
Lewes wormhole: Mark & Jon at the coffee shop IV: right angles
listening wormhole: just saying, is all VII: // `spolitical
reading wormhole: singsong chant
talking wormhole: … vague / thunder
words wormhole: Mark & Jon at the coffee shop II
writing wormhole: Mark & Jon at the coffee shop I

 

and I lose sight of her into memory

Tags

2013, 5*, air, girl, hair, hazel, hill, journey, memory, muse, passing, phone, sight, step, talking, walking

                                the girl
                walks ahead down the hill
                each step gaited and strapped
                                left then right
                hazelnut hair lapping and sweeping –
                                she journeys
                far further than each advance against
                                              the air

                                as I pass
                she is talking into a phone
                                and I lose sight of her into memory

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air wormhole: the quiet whale
girl wormhole: stone
hair wormhole: garden
muse wormhole: neither nude nor / descending a staircase
passing wormhole: free
talking wormhole: mother and daughter
walking wormhole: every step I take

 

stone

Tags

2017, 7*, acceptance, afterlife, barrow, breath, death, girl, hair, life, lost, parent, place, settlement, sky, speech, stone, time, world

courtesy of https://historicengland.org.uk – hope she doesn’t mind

                                there was
                                just out
                                and hunt
                                and gather

                                and then
                                we stopped
                                to keep
                                and found

                the whole world wider than the sky

                                that we
                                got lost
                                to where
                                we were

                                and time
                                which came
                                to late
                                and so we

                                hauled
                                the stones
                                to fix
                                place

                                and dis
                                covered
                                in …
                                and life

                                and death
                                the smell of
                                deepness
                                the breath

                                of stone
                “you know what they were talking about
                                in class …
                                Kirsty …”

                                scampering
                                sideways
                                down the
                                slope untied

                                hair waving
                                all over
                                the place
                “… they were talking about barrows, burial

                                chambers;
                                we’re standing
                                on them
                                now – ”

                                all over
                                the place;
                                I’ve come
                                from the

                                ground I’ll
                                go back to
                                the ground
                                when time

 

perspective; read the whole sequence as it treads sideways down through time: in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

acceptance wormhole: Prajnaparamita // Maitreya
breath & hair & life wormhole: brown corduroy shirt / and dark redwine tie
death wormhole: where it has taken birth / may it not decrease …
girl wormhole: neither nude nor / descending a staircase
sky wormhole: ssreet chak-chak
speech wormhole: retirement
stone & time & world wormhole: weight

 

neither nude nor / descending a staircase

Tags

2015, 4*, cafe, doing, girl, Marcel Duchamp, movement, muse, portrait, step, work

                neither nude nor
                descending a staircase

                tallgirl footplant
                squareround roundtable
                legtake weightswing
                clothlinger ‘n’ widescoop

                stoopgather wideshoulder
                footplant shiftsquare
                headturn shoulderbare
                headlift straightstep

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

doing wormhole: not / the Catcher
girl & muse wormhole: sleep now
work wormhole: matter

 

sleep now

Tags

1997, 2012, 7*, breathing, cotton, doing, dream, dress, embarrassment, evening, feet, girl, hands, identity, lap, legs, movement, muse, neck, portal, purpose, quiet, searching, shop, shoulders, sitting, sleep, streetlight, talking, toes, waiting, writing, yellow

I am safe in a corner shop (looking for portals on shelves in racks)
evening gathers inside ending-day-busy streetlights just          on

a girl and myself waiting to be served quiet     I am seated     waiting
the girl is fidgeting her shoe drawing her foot out slightly

to see her veined feet the root of her toes; she notices me noticing
and moves to another part of the shop adjusting         something

I am sorry; she has on a yellow dress; she comes back to the counter
stands beside me talking to the shopkeeper adjusting her tights now

plucking them up raising her dress a little, she steps and sits on my lap
without talking without referring to me still talking to the shopkeeper

clean crumpled yellow cotton neck; oh; a little bashful I put my arms
around her waist, she continues to talk engaged in her business

her hands come to rest on my hands on her legs I am embarrassed
but she is comfortable in my lap moving and leaning as she talks

thank you yellow cotton shoulder, now I know what to write
now I know what to do, now I can breathe      deeply, I think I could

sleep now

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

breathing & doing wormhole: I
dream & girl & muse wormhole: adjustment
evening wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
feet & writing wormhole: returning home handsome
hands wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
identity wormhole: passersby
quiet wormhole: through the pane – poewieview #34
searching wormhole: cut while you’re ahead/cut while you’re a thread – poewieview #35
sitting wormhole: time
sleep wormhole: gone black
streetlight wormhole: well,
talking wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow
waiting & yellow wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – snow

 

adjustment

Tags

2013, 5*, adjustment, bed, doing, dream, eyes, feeling, girl, life, light, muse, opening, perspective, questioning, waking

                           did I talk to the girl
                           on the bed as I woke
                           about how the eyes
                           need to adapt to the
                           light when you open
                           them at first which feels
                           uncomfortable but is
                           a sign of adjusting to
                           the light which is a
                           new addition and that
                           anything given to do
                           in life which is good will feel
                           uncomfortable at first
                           because it is good being
                      adjustment of perspective to the new
                           or did I dream all that …?

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

doing wormhole: [once a] dilemminal [always a dilemminal]
dream wormhole: what life went on
eyes wormhole: !
girl wormhole: Hurst Green
life wormhole: just one, open, nerve,
light wormhole: was there a moon / on the alleyway wall / confused in front of / the city skyline?
muse wormhole: returning home handsome