To a Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on

the street a paper bag

of them in her hand

They taste good to her

They taste good

to her. They taste

good to her

You can see it by

the way she gives herself

to the one half

sucked out in her hand

Comforted

a solace of ripe plums

seeming to fill the air

They taste good to her

-- William Carlos Williams

Flowers by the Sea

When over the flowery, sharp pasture's
edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form -- chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement -- or the shape

perhaps -- of restlessness, wheras

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

-- William Carlos Williams

The Rose

The rose is obsolete

but each petal ends in

an edge, the double facet

cementing the grooved

columns of air -- The edge

cuts without cutting

meets -- nothing  -- renews

itself in metal or porcelain --

whither? It ends --

But if it ends

the start is begun

so that to engage roses

becomes a geometry --

Sharper, neater, more cutting

figured in majolica --

the broken plate

glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense

makes copper roses

steel roses --

The rose carried weight of love

but love is at an end -- of roses

It is at the edge of the 

petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat

laboredness -- fragile

plucked, moist, half-raised

cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's

edge and the

From the the petal's edge a line starts

that being of steel

infinitely fine, infinitely

rigid penetrates

the Milky Way

without contact -- lifting

from it -- neither hanging

nor pushing --

The fragility of the flower

unbruised

penetrates space.

-- William Carlos Williams

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

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed

and the writing

be of words, slow and quick, sharp

to strike, quiet to wait,

sleepless.

-- through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Compose. (No ideas

but in things) Invent!

Saxifrage is my flower that splits

the rocks.

-- William Carlos Williams