Six Poems
In Boyce
Boyce is the town
with the quietest name.
It has an old stone house in it
with a bronze centaur
with a clock in its side
and a guy on the roof,
traipsing the roof, expertly
imitating the whistle
of a bird never seen
in Boyce but stuffed. There’s a death-
defying moment
you catch your breath
in this world, afraid your
fellow man will lose
his whistle with his stride,
tripping from cornice
to cornice, catching himself
just in time each time.
–
Phantom Limb
Everybody knows
when completeness comes
the part must pass away.
But when I, the part, come last,
completeness is left scratching its
Ivy League head,
befuddled as the hillock
slammed by daisies under snow,
thinking a volcano might stir
beneath its inch.
A little deeper,
you’d call it grandeur,
delusion of.
But after all the drift’s
not up to nothing,
starting now to tower
in all humility.
–
The Lesser Gods of Earth
Too late for the worms,
too early for the birds,
we jump like fleas
a thousand times our height,
freighted with the blood of dogs
so big you could put
saddles on them and ride,
force the frontiers back
of every hostile yard.
–
There’s a Whale aground at Wijk aan Zee
You hate the world.
I am a planet.
You wreck the image.
I’m a picture.
You dispraise the body.
I am God’s bathtub
turned inside out.
I wear my ring
of residue and brine
like a girdle
at my waterline.
And what a joke,
your House of Nassau
in his ostrich-feathered hat,
scrambling down
toward me from the dunes,
a posy to his nose
lest I prove some sickening
ingenuity of Spain’s.
His daughter, that is yours
following like a dog,
lifts her skirts
with astonishing ease
at sight of me, to the waist.
Squats and excitedly pees
in the sand.
So there can be
no doubt: the velvet
of her skirts is black.
Her hair is stacked
into a harness of pearls.
–
Hell
On arrival I dropped
a big suitcase
from each of both
my hands.
They fell in the grass
like it was any old grass,
so out of place
in that consummate fire,
the cases so at home
in their alligator skins.
–
Sorry to Ask
Sorry to ask, but was it funny or sad
that the swan fell in love with a paddleboat?
That the dancer took a thousand leaps
before he took the one that stunned the world?
That the voicemail started out It’s me, just me,
and after that was just words in a voice
you’d never heard before? You know as well as I do
the swan can’t go on, nursing his first crush forever.
The dancer can’t leap without end in endless space.
And the checking of that mail, whether it’s two seconds
or a thousand years from now, that voice you don’t know
calling all the dead by their proper names?
It’s the same as when you catch up with a friend
at a bar, after “it’s been too long,” and she looks
hard at the ring of water between her hands
flat on the table, and she says, Well…
~
Kenny Williams’ poems have appeared most recently in FIELD, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, Third Coast, Fence, and the American Literary Review, and his poem “School of Practical Dissection” was recently featured on Poetry Daily.