Williams
I remember the slowness of the sunset and geese creaking and crying in long skeins above our heads. The noise of them stepped over into my dreams.
Julia Blackburn from Time Song.
“Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.
John Keats
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
Jane Kenyon
What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver in I looked Up.
Fog
My soul spools out of me,
Comforting the horses legs,
Stretching to the circle,
Rising up the frog-mottled stones.
It awakens my ancestors.
I hear their voices calling,
Calling me from the stones
Pulling on my fog soul,
Reeling me in,
Back,
Down,
Home.
Ian Williams, May 23 2011
A Young Man's death
Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death
When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party
Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides
Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one
Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death
Roger McGough
Hogs’ Christmas Dinner
Wind in the water
Frost in the air
Hogs on the river
The devil may care.
Slow moves the boat
It must be the tide
Or the wind at our throat
Perhaps one of us died
Back on the shore
Boat on the rack
Excuses galore
And coffee with Jack
Ian Williams, 2005
Do not be the shouldered oar that ended up far from the brine and whiff of venture.
Seamus Heaney
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
Mary Oliver
Richard Redux
Verse at the end of my first Bennington semester - Thanks to Will
Now is the winter of our first semester
Made glorious summer by this entering class
And all the cant that on our brows lour’d
In the deep bosom of Liam buried.
Now are our voices rung clear in Vermont’s cold air
Our halting words drowned in Tischman’s hall
Our boorish prose changed to merry meters,
Our dreadful solecisms to erudite remarks.
Grim-visaged writer’s block hath shriveled
And now, instead of sweating blood on blank pages
To claim the rite of passage
Our muse sallies forth
To the luscious praises of our fellow bards.
But I, that am not blessed with ready metaphors
Nor made to declaim in dulcet tones;
I, that am crudely versed, and want the muse’s favor
To write before a critical class
I, that am missing grammar and fair syntax,
Short-changed by Broca’s neurons,
Prolix, wordy, sent before my time
Into this writing world, barely literate,
And that so long-winded and desultory
That critics bark at me as I declaim;
Why, I, in this literary eerie
Have no delight to pass away the time
Unless to read mine own prose
And choke on mine own verboseness
And therefore, since I cannot prove a writer,
To entertain these high-minded students,
I am determined to prove a parrot joke teller.