Raindrops on a Briar


I, a writer at one time hipped on
painting, did not consider
the effects, painting,
for that reason, static, on

the contrary the stillness of
the objects -- the flowers, the gloves --
freed them precisely by that
from a necessity merely to move

in space as if they had been --
not children! but the thinking male
or the charged and deliver-
ing female frantic with ecstasies;

served rather to present, for me,
a more pregnant motion: a 
series of varying leaves 
clinging still, let us say, to

the cat-briar after last night's
storm, its waterdrops
ranged upon the arching stems
irregularly as an accompaniment.




-- William Carlos Williams