William Carlos Williams

The clipped brand of free verse favored by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) has had a tremendous influence on English language poetry. He wrote plainly, tersely, in a style that mimicked, he believed, the way Americans talked. (A 20th Century obsession, that—but how to pin down something as pluralistic and polyglot as American speech?) Though eventually he adopted a system of tiered tercets that lent his work the “look” of poetry, for much of his life he wrote short poems with short lines in which the lineation seemed deliberately artless.

One might argue that an appearance of artlessness can be artful too. Brainlessness is another matter. To compare the moon with a woman’s thighs, as in this month’s featured poem, is to commit a sin of inanity, for here a single thing—the moon—is compared to two things—thighs. Is the poet seeing double? Worse, have the poor woman’s thighs been chopped up and viewed in cross section? Only then might a thigh look anything like a disk. As it turns out, it’s the thighs that fascinate our narrator here. Speaking as a woman, I am just glad that no one fetishizes mine in such a lunarly lunatic manner!


The Cold Night

It is cold. The white moon
is up among her scattered stars—
like the bare thighs of
the Police Sergeant's wife—among
her five children . . .
No answer. Pale shadows lie upon
the frosted grass. One answer:
It is midnight, it is still
and it is cold . . . !
White thighs of the sky! a
new answer out of the depths of
my male belly: In April . . .
In April I shall see again—In April!
the round and perfect thighs
of the Police Sergeant's wife
perfect still after many babies.
Oya!
——Back to Dreck Contents——