Leslie Williams

Not embittered even while freezing to the ice of their own lakes. The night I was leaving for Madrid into the noisy party a dazzling friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much (as a couple of kids on the dance floor want) to slow the tempo, hold there longer, to feel that seedly longing to be pressed into the soil, or that little lift the mothers get when stocking larders, even now, vestige of the primitive urge to be provided for and to provide. I went alone to see that balcony in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver tray and all but smoked them for you; after your towels had warmed in London’s best hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad, glad now for the rest of empty August and the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew, glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners that I have stood alone wondering at illuminated books, looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider at the Tate—at times the best kept universe was my own, no interceding docents or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous wandering—waif, naïf. I liked the light enormously so why did I obey the bell that called me in?

Tulip, you Bled on my green rug. A jungle-red petal Where my little kits Rollick, fallen like a warning— Yesterday I sat outside In the returned sun Trying to make more Friends; after all these years To think of yourself Snapped, the sweet sap Tremoring between States of ice and melt. An old love wrote to me From his wife’s country place To say he had been hunting there And could appreciate the hounds; In a white coat he is closely Setting people’s bones, opening Their backs with the hands I knew The cancellated paths Of saying no or yes: I could have fallen To a fearing of the little foxes lately Come into the yard (There is so little I know about what to do) But I let them be.