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STILL LIFE
C.K. Williams (1936 - )
This poem tugs. It tugs at memories; memories of things that probably didn't happen the way one remembers them but which time and old age have modified to fill a need that time and old age have created; memories of days gone by, of dances, of picnics, of drive-in movies, of long, hot afternoons at the beach, of late-night bonfires on the far side of the lake, of youthful crushes, of old girl friends who long ago drifted away but somehow can't be forgotten; memories that bring memories of Whittier's memorable lines "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these 'It might have been'"
Charles Kenneth Williams is one of America's great, contemporary poets. He has won many poetry prizes, including a Pulitzer in 1999, the poetry category of the National Book Awards in 2003, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which is one of the highest honors given to an American poet and which carries an award of $100,000. He is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton. I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do. It comes with a warning that it will not only tug at your memories but regularly tug you back to its bittersweet message.
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Still Life
All we do -- how old are we? I must be twelve, she a little older;
thirteen, fourteen -- is hold hands
and wander out behind a barn, past a rusty hay-rake, a half-collapsed
old Model T,
then down across a barbed-wire gated pasture -- early emerald
rye-grass, sumac in the dip --
to where a brook, high with run-off from a morning storm
broadened and spilled over --
turgid, muddy viscous, snagged here and there with shattered
branches --in a bottom meadow.
I don't know then that the place, a mile from anywhere, and day,
brilliant, sultry, balmy,
are intensifying everything I feel, but I know now that what made
simply touching her
almost a consummation was as much the light, the sullen surge of
water through the grass,
the coils of scent, half hers -- the unfamiliar perspiration, talc,
something else I'll never place --
and half the air's: mown hay somewhere, crushed clover underfoot,
the brook, the breeze.
I breathe it still, that breeze, and, not knowing how I know for certain
that it's that,
although it is, I know, exactly that, I drag it in and drive it -- rich,
delicious,
as biting as wet tin -- down, my mind casting up flickers to fit it --
another field a hollow --
and now her face, even it, frail and fine, comes momentarily to focus
and her hand,
intricate and slim, the surprising firmness of her clasp, how
judiciously it meshes mine.
All we do -- how long does it last? an hour or two, not even one whole
afternoon:
I'll never see her after that, and strangely (strange even now), not
mind, as though,
in that afternoon the revelations weren't only of the promises of flesh,
but of resignation --
all we do is trail along beside the stream until it narrows, find the one-
log bridge
and cross into the forest on the other side: silent footfalls, hills, a
crest, a lip.
I don't know then how much someday -- today -- I'll need it all, how
much want to hold it,
and not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so
emphatically and yet elude us,
not have it, not the way I would, not the way I'll want to have that day,
that light,
the motes that would have risen from the stack of straw we leaned on
for a moment,
the tempered warmth of air which so precisely seemed the coefficient
of my fearful ardor,
not, after all, even the objective place, those shifting paths I can't
really follow now
but only can compile from how many other ambles into other woods,
other stoppings in a glade --
(for a while we were lost, and frightened; night was just beyond the
hills; we circled back) --
even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so
much imagination,
a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with
little hope, to tear away.
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