C. K. Williams

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore, another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly. It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you, relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw. Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you, you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me, my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring, trying to heave itself back to its other way with you. But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you? Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds? Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it, a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I, not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve? Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am, how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all. Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn, to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"? We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours. All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains. After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall, we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident, the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order. Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers, setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking. I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous. The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant. When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles. Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs, a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside. In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls, it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles, the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls. When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails, work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip, the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages. Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us. However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood: we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday. Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions. I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest, the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so. I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool. I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks. But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves. Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed, offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me— I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things— she’d decided that I was after all all right ... twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant, which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected, but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted, what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known. I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg. The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train, and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again, (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back, (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime, the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail: that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls. Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath, mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand, feels the way you do with your nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed; the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ... No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here; it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen, something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast; as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale, a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail, drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples— I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…” then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave, a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures, their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one, perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others, was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings as though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me, to situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now, the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again, this time the way he’ll refer to a figure he meets as “the life of…” not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I, our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives, his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem, mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark, his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist, mine having to know for us both that everything ends, world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound, not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling, keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird; not as remembrance, grief for so many gone, nor either that other tangle of recall, regret for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions, petrified roots too deep to ever excise; a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh of delight in astonishing being, of being in being, with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what, not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love; not even war, fuck war, sighing for war, sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease; more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note, sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us, echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world, on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge, mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise, cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment, din from which every emotion henceforth emerges, and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides: sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue, of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

1. If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront? I’m a child then, yet already I’ve composed this conscience-beast, who harries me: is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he, could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse, and orchestrate ever undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself? 2 The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying their call, take me along, and I’m sent out with the dead boy’s brother and some others to play. We’re joking around, and some words come to my mind, which to my amazement are said. How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies? is what’s said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet, everyone stares, and I want to know now why that someone in me who’s me yet not me let me say it. Shouldn’t he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me, it didn’t matter that I’d really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when? 3 I could hear the boy’s mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing then stopping. Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her it would end? Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, still does, me, for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes? She didn’t laugh, though, or I never heard her.How do you know when you can laugh? Why couldn’t someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but to explain? The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn’t hear anything more from inside. The way now sometimes what’s in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really, forgets.

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter. The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded —I hadn't noticed — and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil. Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do. A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted ware- house down the block and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me, their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other. I know where they're going—to the "Legion": once, when I was putting something out, they stopped, both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn't ten o'clock—and we chatted for a bit. I don't know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder if they're lovers? They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening hap- hazardly along, contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters, tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat, his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down, to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb. In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show. Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're not, at least, thank god, laughing. Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting. Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun. He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down, set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him. No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber, the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair, then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be, and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he'd known, all along, that I was watching and I can't help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too, I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours. It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold, and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then real- ized made a figure eight, what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent, and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out. Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he'd blazed, but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away, up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight, with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signal- ing erratically against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky. In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white, its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relent- less, unadorned.

1 Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things, from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need. Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block, and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected, where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood. Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman? It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are. Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations— Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye. 2 But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain, aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards. Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance! Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling, we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher, who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.