The Old man William Carlos Williams, who had been famous for kindness
And for bringing to our poetry a mannerless speaking,
In the aftermath of a stroke was possessed by guilt
And began to construct for his wife the chronicle
Of his peccadilloes, an unforgivable thing, a mistake
Like all pleas for forgiveness, but he persisted
Blindly, obstinately, each day, as though in the end
It would relieve her to know the particulars
Of affairs she must have guessed and tacitly permitted,
For she encouraged his Sunday drives across the river.
His poems suggest as much; anyone can see it.
The thread, the binding of the voice, is a single hair
Spliced from the different hairs of different lovers,
And it clings to his poems, blond and dark,
Tangled and straight, and runs on beyond the page.
I carry it with me, saying, "I have found it so."
It is a world of human blossoming, after all.
But the old woman, sitting there like rust—
For her, there would be no more poems of stolen
Plums, of round and firm trunks of young trees,
Only the candor of the bedpan and fouled sheets,
When there could no longer have been any hope
That he would recover, when the thing she desired
Was not his health so much as his speechlessness.
[Rodney Jones {1950- } 'Plea for Forgiveness', from The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th anniversary edition]
No comments:
Post a Comment