March 5, 2015

Kenny Williams

ROSEMARY LAMB

The heaven of the gods that are not God
is never big enough. It’s always filling up
with smoke, the greasy breath
of sacrifice, which gods alone can take as food.
Our Father gave this business up
to stink up our bright booths
of plush and gold. The server serves
the slaughtered lamb, the lungs
the expanding sky. I sing while I can.
The palace of the gods is always adding on.
And if you glut yourself on smoke
you’ll live forever and forever
is an end to the story of the gods,
the start of all that’s come before,
sheer prolog to the puff.

from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Kenny Williams: “I’m an animal by nature, an animal-eater by design, a pagan by sensibility, and a Catholic by conversion. The phrase ‘of faith’ seems to me highly problematic. Like the word ‘Christian’ nowadays, it could mean anything or nothing. To call yourself a ‘poet of faith’ is a dangerous move, something like calling yourself a saint or a genius, but since I’m playing by the rules, and since I take the Catholic dogmata as my model of reality, and since I take the unfashionable view that art is a useful tool by which the audience (that brilliant goofball) may deepen its appreciation of the predicament of being human within the all-demanding context of objective truth, i.e. reality, I call myself, quite possibly in error, a poet of faith.”

Rattle Logo

November 16, 2013

Kenny Williams

THE HUMMINGBIRD

Before they gave a concert
the Greeks would drop copper pots
on marble floors, so
you could hear the silence
reassembling itself, a blank space
for the flute. More like
what we’d call a kazoo.
And what’s with the hummingbird
planted in the mouth?
My mother used to fill a feeder
with water and sugar
and turn up her crooked but decidedly
feminine thumbs.
“The ones that come are this big,”
she would say, for those
of us who won’t rest without removing
our mothers’ hands
with precision saws,
who want to scream
but are afraid to shatter
the silence in which
we’ll have to bite our tongues and hand
their old hands back to them,
priceless pairs
of antique cups
they want to drink from
but can only drop.

from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
Tribute to Southern Poets

__________

Kenny Williams (Virginia): “I hate it when poets pretend they don’t know anything about their own writing processes and get arty and mysterious when asked about it, claiming in a zillion different ways that they ‘receive’ their poems from the Beyond, or that the poems already exist in the abstract and that they, the poet, just ‘discover them,’ etc. I’ve been hearing a lot of this kind of thing lately. I think it comes in waves. The writing of poems remains, as ever, the manipulation of linguistic materials toward an artistic end residing in form. Never trust anyone who denies this or tries to talk around it. I live in Richmond, Virginia, hold an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and have a website with pictures of dogs and cats on it.” (website)

Rattle Logo

September 2, 2013

Kenny Williams

THE RETURN

When I returned to earth after forty thousand years
there were no more graves, no more cathedrals.
No public parks, no public. I looked everywhere
and couldn’t find a single statue of a hero put up
by a committee. There was simply none of that sadness
that can only be satisfied by a dose of dry-eyed Mahler,
sex in a sand trap or hunters in the snow. There were,
understand, no elevators. There were no jailbirds
to be prayed for, no thieves broken backward
across the tops of their crosses, no city walls or citadels
hung by a thread over the pit of the sky.
There had been a Russian documentary film
about a man gone in search of the birthplace of the wind,
but I couldn’t find it. There wasn’t the hospital garden
where, one cold Sunday morning, a man came to cut roses
in the face of all prohibitions, posted and implied,
for his wife, a girl he’d married ages ago, out of revenge
against the woman he loved, whose throat he feasted on
while her husband was in Honolulu with his lover,
who was working on her PhD in there’s-nobody-left-to-know-what,
probably something to do with marine mammals,
not a single specimen of which could I track down
to confirm or deny the rose-garden scene in its strange
un-hearable tongue. You must understand:
when I returned to earth after forty thousand years
there was not one single traffic circle or comic strip,
no Lucy diagnosing Charlie Brown or throwing
Schroeder’s piano in a tree. No one to take mental notes
on how a black-haired bitch handles competition.
No competition. No Darwin taking it all back
on his deathbed. No rest cures, glory holes, horsefly bites.
Not so much as a scrap of Brussels lace I might describe
in this report, in pointless triumph. Not so much
as a girl dressed like a garden statue, raising a birdcage
with no bird in it, like a lantern in the light of day.
In my mind and yours that cage tapers up into a copper nipple
with a ring through it. My friends, hear me when I tell you
there wasn’t so much as a dog to sniff me out.

from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Kenny Williams: “All my poems are about the same thing: human duration, in time, between the Fall and the Last Day. ‘The Return’ seems to be some sort of exception, taking place after the Last Day, though very much shot through with its clarifying light. What’s more, the more I think about it, ‘The Return’ really describes two returns: the return to earth after forty thousand years and the return to report what wasn’t found there. Which of these two returns the title refers to depends, I guess, on the angle from which you read the poem. I’ve always been obsessed with the emptied earth needing a witness to its emptiness, and as I was writing the poem I had to grapple with the complication of that witness’s own need for an audience that would 1) share his frame of Western culture reference and 2) be real. I hold degrees from the University of Virginia and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I own and operate The Fan Sitter, a pet care business, in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia.” (website)

Rattle Logo

March 3, 2010

Kenny Williams

DAPHNE

In the ancient world,
when someone threw a dinner party
they’d all lean in
to hear old stories
as if they were new.
When everyone retired
to their countless separate rooms,
the eel and duck,
the peacock and candied locust
sweetly brewing,
they’d lie awake plotting
their children’s future.
Would it be through love or hate,
marrying Apollonia to Peneus,
the old river god
with farms half a pregnancy away
and an allergy to fish?
Such details one thinks to put in letters
to in-laws one will never meet!
Tonight on the news
the molester was sentenced,
twelve centuries in jail.
The time it takes to rise and fall.
Against her parents’ insistence
one girl had a child
with fine green veins
pulsing in its downy skull.
One day in the park,
near the sound of water,
the child will stand,
wobble and fall forward,
crawling with desperate technique
on hands and knees,
like one of those soldiers
with sticks and leaves
stuck on his helmet.
The girl will choke back tears
too true to be believed,
her nose nearly wetting the page
whose author she seems to be.

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

__________

Kenny Williams: “‘Daphne’ began with the sound of water in a public park. Only later, remembering this sound as I wrote the poem, or imagining that I remembered it, did it seem important to my experience in the park that day that not only did I not see the source of the water-sound but that it never occurred to me to seek it out or interrogate its apparent absence. The leafy child, naturally, was imported into the poem from my imagination, the child’s mother and father from the dramas of exploitation media, the Roman dinner from the mists of historic memory. Like all the work that is finished in this world, ‘Daphne’ frightens me.”

Rattle Logo