Jonathan Williams

There are more things to love than we would dare to hope for. —Richard of St. Victor where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with blazons of fennel and umbels of dill fell through the spokes of a wheel on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle, sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider— and spied: “saw the very drops of sweat glittering frostily between the shoulder blades” of a lad …on and on he spied and bled from the blades of his cycle, small as a spider, hiding in the fireweed, getting wet from the skins of many human suns aground at the Kentish river near Tunbridge Wells, where the dill lulls, and all boys spoil…

for Robert Duncan one comes to language from afar, the ear fears for its sound-barriers— but one “comes”; the language “comes” for The Beckoning Fair One plant you now, dig you later, the plaint stirs winter earth… air in a hornet’s nest over the water makes a solid, six-sided music… a few utterly quiet scenes, things are very far away—“form is emptiness” comely, comely, love trembles and the sweet-shrub

I.“If the Night Could Get Up & Walk” I cannot put my hand into a cabbage to turn on the light, but the moon moves over the field of dark cabbage and an exchange fills all veins. The cabbage is also a globe of light, the two globes now two eyes in my saturated head! II.“One Must Try Behind the Hills” Eight Great Dahlias stood beyond the Mountains. They set fire to the Sun in a black wood beyond the Mountains, in the Valley of Vision In the Valley of Vision the Fission of Flowers yields all Power in the Valley of Vision. Eight Suns on Eight Stems, aflame!

Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858 I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In Pan’s spring rain “drives his victims out to the animals with whom they become as one”— pain and paeans, hung in the mouth, to be sung II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal: A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature… Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest: I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down and The book I love is everywhere And not in idle words John,claritas tell us the words are not idle, the syllables are able to turn plantains into quatrains, tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to form corollas in light clusters of tones… Sam Palmer hit it: “Milton, by one epithet draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw, ‘Pine and monumental oak’: I have just been trying to draw a large one in Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than any in the park.” Muse in a meadow, compose in a mind! III.What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me Harris’s Sparrow— 103 species seen by the Georgia Ornithological Society in Rabun Gap, including Harris’s Sparrow, with its black crown, face, and bib encircling a pink bill It was, I think, the third sighting in Georgia, and I should have been there instead of reading Clare, listening to catbirds and worrying about Turdus migratorious that flew directly into the Volkswagen and bounced into a ditch Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d been going 40 you might be whistling in some grass. 10 tepid people got 10 stale letters one day earlier, I cannot be happy about that. IV.What the Night Tells Me the dark drones on in the southern wheat fields and the hop flowers open before the sun’s beckoning the end is ripeness, the wind rises, and the dawn says yes YES! it says “yes” V.What the Morning Bells Tell Me Sounds, and sweet aires that give delight and hurt not— that, let Shakespeare’s delectation bear us VI.What Love Tells Me Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien and prays: Dear God, Sweet Jesus, Save Us, Save Us… the Light in the Grass, the Wind on the Hill, are in my head, the world cannot be heard Leaves obliterate my  heart, we touch each other far apart… Let us count into the Darkness

December 13, 1993 John Gordon Boyd died on the birthday of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers: Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness” and with extraordinary eyes & ears… I think of two texts on the grievous occasion of his death: “Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what I can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands.” — Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis and two lines in Rainier Maria Rilke, John’s favorite poet, that say it all… Was tun Sie, Gott, Wenn ich bin st ü rbe? “What will you do, God, when I am dead?”

Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers & Other Worms look out into the crapulous moonlight: figures of women cascading through the Sunday night; no beer in sight. I remember the Night-blooming Cereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s patron, it hangs in the hall outside the bedroom swaying hungrily like these giant white goddesses of the dark grotto… there are touring cars and men with large guns singing through the woods behind us.