suspecting all along that I’d be accused of vacillation and weakheartedness

I kept changing my mind, not about the essentials, love, food, a 

warm bed, a life to live without anyone overtly intruding onto the al- 

ready difficult endeavor of creating that problematic, a soul. 

         I kept changing my mind and clearing my throat and trying out 

tons of voice and methods of address (I also changed my mode of 

address as much as I could without appearing entirely and 

untrustworthily erratic) and the pitch and the syntax that would come 

rising in a clarity as twisted and touching as a tree’s; also perhaps I 

changed along with everyone else in wondering whether it was a 

concept like freedom or a concrete like bread or some conceit more 

than mere bread that would include a word, poem, book, which drove 

us so furiously that we didn’t believe our own calm reasonings about 

the death that surely hungered for us and the infinite sleep that 

desired us, both of them ravenous for the best of us, the parts we knew 

best. 

         I kept changing my mind, suspecting all along that I’d be 

accused of vacillation and weakheartedness, and so accusing myself of 

vacillation and weakheartedness and of indolence, which Kafka said 

was impatience, but I could never bring myself to believe him, 

impatience being perhaps the only virtue I believed in, and I wasn’t 

accustomed to accusing myself of virtues, only of what I needed to go 

on with this uncertain project of mind changing, misunderstanding, 

incomprehensible misapprehensions on which I had staked my life but 

in such undemanding ways, not having been put to the torture for 

it or the flame for it or death for it, so how could I believe, how could 

I accept, how could I even let myself pride myself for one moment 

on having survived it? 

         And sometimes it seemed the whole world went, and words went, 

everything went but still here I was with my mind and desires often 

pulling in their opposite directions, chanting songs of opposition 

and love, yet still my mind pitched itself this way and that, as heavy 

as a bull’s head, as empty as the barrel going over the falls with the 

cowardly daredevil watching with us from the shore. 

         I kept changing my mind, and only the voices, other voices in the 

street, the park, the room with me, all seeming to beckon me, calling 

me by my name, kept me here, kept me where I knew after everything 

else I should be. 

 

[C.K. Williams {1936-2015} 'I Kept Changing My Mind', from All at Once]