Love: Beginnings
They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them,
so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self
and the self-admiring entity and unity they make --
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back
so far in her laughter at his laughter
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual
in the headiness of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again,
touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away
soaring back in flame into the sexual --
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin,
that filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart,
snorting again, stamping in its stall.
Commentary
from “Flesh and Blood” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987).
After reading “Breaking Up” in your anthology, when I found this one about beginnings, thought it needed to be included as part of a cycle of sorts.
Notes about the author:
C. K. Williams was born in 1936 in Newark, New Jersey. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003); Repair (1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). Williams has also published five works of translation: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa) (1983); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978). Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.
— Raj Palaniswamy
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Adam Donovan · 27 August 2004
As a man who loves men-in all ways, as brother as well as lover-this poem reminds me of the heat and majesty of man and woman when they unbutton and let fall open their great gifts for each other. I feel the settling down into the ground of my own maleness in the presence of a certain kind of woman. And I hear myself breathe, yes, that is how it is for us, isn’t it! Adam Donovan
pgmurthy · 6 September 2004
I will give you my interpretation.
It appears ‘hitch’ means a jerk, a hobble or limp possibly implying that the onlooker who saw the scene was unseated in his balance and recalled that restless urge in the groin that accompanies such a sight and scene. The heart is the seat of emotion and although it was detached, and old, sore and battered and foundered, momentarily lost its poise, identified with the joyous scene and leaped to join by stamping its feet – though in its own stall, its rightful place.
Murthy