What have I to say to you When we shall meet? Yet— I lie here thinking of you. The stain of love Is upon the world. Yellow, yellow, yellow, It eats into the leaves, Smears with saffron The horned branches that lean Heavily Against a smooth purple sky. There is no light— Only a honey-thick stain That drips from leaf to leaf And limb to limb Spoiling the colours Of the whole world. I am alone. The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky. See me! My hair is dripping with nectar— Starlings carry it On their black wings. See, at last My arms and my hands Are lying idle. How can I tell If I shall ever love you again As I do now?
-- William Carlos Williams
1 comment:
Thank you for reminding me of one of my favorite WCW poems at this dark time. Did you know there is more than one version of this poem? The one you have posted here is on The Academy of American Poets site. The Poetry Foundation site has this one on reproduced pages of the November 1916 edition of its Poetry magazine, but in its listed WCW poems there is a shorter version ending with the lines, "you far off there under/the wine-red selvage of the west!" I prefer the version you posted, but I appreciate the introduction of yet another color, "wine-red," in the shorter version. In both cases, WCW speaks of the importance of love, as he does almost forty years later in his 1955 poem, Of Asphodel, where he is writing about the new world containing the atomic bomb, and says, "There is no power/So great as love/which is a sea,/which is a garden." These days, I think in particular of his lines from, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there."
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