John Williams
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Having received an MA in Writing, John has recently returned to
the Boston area to complete his Education degree, and he is
presently compiling manuscripts composed from the last two
years of traveling and living abroad. Some previous or upcoming
publications include: Flint Hills Review, Cadillac Cicatrix,
Juked, The Journal, Barnwood International Poetry,
Phantasmagoria, The Alembic, Poetic Diversity, River Oak
Review, Tertulia Magazine, Black Rock and Sage, Language and
Culture, Ghoti, and Red Hawk Review.
the Boston area to complete his Education degree, and he is
presently compiling manuscripts composed from the last two
years of traveling and living abroad. Some previous or upcoming
publications include: Flint Hills Review, Cadillac Cicatrix,
Juked, The Journal, Barnwood International Poetry,
Phantasmagoria, The Alembic, Poetic Diversity, River Oak
Review, Tertulia Magazine, Black Rock and Sage, Language and
Culture, Ghoti, and Red Hawk Review.
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On Footprints
Iceland
Unlike in sand, feet sink into this course
camel hair grass and remain
like fingerprints at a crime scene.
There is no sea to shave our markings
every high tide, no trees to discard
their orange leaves, no clock
ever-ready to pause lost thought
and retrace hurried steps.
These sprouting green cocoons simply give
under my weight and as they spread
from mountain to shore
I can see where I’ve been.
Temperatures rocket and fall so quickly here,
welting the fields. Night comes down
wearing a volcanic, toothy grin.
I walk without eyes
slow and heavy
reading memory’s frail odes in the silent streams
and vocal wind, in the fat pleasantry
of the thief of time’s hands.
With nowhere to go I haven’t been, I go
always to where I have.
My words are my footsteps
slow and heavy
tonguing the sore on my heart, looking back.
Poetry sought me here at the end of things
but I had abandoned mirror for touch
and windows for the scent of moss.
I had run to the land of absolutes
seeking naught but breath and solitude.
Yet the grass kept track
of all my failures and fears and triumphs
reminding I am alive again
suffocating by the wavering sword of my shadow
and feigning blindness
to roll in the mud of emptiness, muteness.
So I’ve now gone the way of grass
and tried to learn and failed
to try and learned to fail
and as I begin the long journey back
open eyes scanning what I’ve lost
I see beside each footprint a space
where I never stepped.
On These Warmer Nights of Sleepwalking
On these warmer nights of sleepwalking
lamplight brings the body’s thin sheath
closer to a song that like words born of soul
belong neither to the object nor the poet.
By dreaming I suppose I always meant moving
and by detachment I grip the balustrade tightest.
Down below all Danubes converge
and everything exhales but cannot see its breath
and that slight sweat lining a lip
is rainwater condensing and steaming the window
that eyes down the saint
with his back to the churchyard.
And Vienna is a city like any other illusion
and, eyes blindly agape, I see all things in life
lean into me, not into but through me
like a warning voice unheeded.
All is distant. All is moment
and then like moment is lost.
On the warmest nights
when the statues shed their clothes
and naked, suddenly all flaccid flesh
blushing, embarrassed at the artifice exposed,
beg the vagrants and sleepwalkers for water,
I am water for the world to replenish
the many moments in which finally I am song,
not a poet or illusion, but will awake never to remember.
National Anthem
Only when wheat has poached the day
do we rest,
under a sliver of moon hanging
tired as our heads
with great blue sparks
open and moist as our eyes.
We smile into the communal fire,
rubbing our red hands
warming our night
and talk like lonely madmen
or we don’t talk at all.
Both speech and silence massage
the deep aching spot
between limbs and soul,
as both our dreamt lives and real
bend to pure white exhaustion.
At times, one will sing
lift his sandpaper and flesh voice
up and out into the flames
and fields and sky, and history
remembers with its supple fist of iron.
At times, others join
this somber solo, at first
colliding like sea on rock,
like wet clothes on a washboard,
but soon all voices wrestle together
into a humble anthem
lifting up and out and becoming
more
than tired time-passing
beneath night’s heavy anchor
and the sharp blue sting
of a dying star.
Little Sun, Pinpricked Night
Little sun, pinpricked night,
you with the gray coat of souls
and black rings of years,
pale, thorn-tongued, whispering
up into a crest of air,
bellowing back down
to the blazing cloth of sea.
Witness my human attempts
to remain human
as you pull me inside
and drain me of the phosphorescent.
Silent, you wave beneath the flag
I ostentatiously wave to prove my breath
not a passing shower
but a flood to quicksand
the driest earth,
to glide like a steel blade
through the hourglass’ pink underbelly.
Larger and larger
I expand into your shape,
a vast, vermilion syllable.
I flood your sentence
with blue-black desire
and blink in your absence
as this beautiful half-death,
constructed as bone, ash, and cloud,
circles the periphery,
a bloodhound tracking nothing.
Oia Sequence
I.
The jewels you finger
while shading your eyes from the sun
are South African blood.
The mule you ride
up these winding island corridors,
the rocky path from sea to civilization,
will know death the moment you disembark.
I purchased those jewels
as promises of love and future
and paid the old, whip-handed mule driver
with my coins. And of the half-heart
proffered you, make me forget
their mouthfuls of sand and the stones
lodged in their lungs
and the useless promises of past-
each wound carefully disguised
as romanticism
and voraciously swallowed.
My heart’s other half,
the one that despises theatrics,
remembers my actions
as water remembers the stones it’s dislodged.
II.
While spying the caldera and such destructions
history cannot erase,
rock scars, disrupted mythologies,
ships cast to the black winds,
I momentarily fail in my obligation to death.
The underfoot mewing of disfigured, stray kittens.
The hollering pawners of watercolor landscapes
existing as earth and sea and fire all around.
The surging tourists with their instinct of rodents
and a brick scarcely eluding my skull.
All these frivolous tears indenture me
to a love and a desperate gripping
to these ends born severed,
as if I could weave together the world
and two by two each walk the thread,
perfectly balanced, never alone.
Never again, I promised the sea.
And ever since I have doubled my efforts
to diminish that trudging fear
that tucks between my legs at night
and when my voice dies within the wind
whipping me into tomorrow,
a blind rush,
a single moment I did not cringe,
a promise broken upon the lip.
III.
The one who writes me has broken for lunch
and with feet and head and fate all my own
I have forgotten the art of movement.
Oia’s polished gold coin of sunset
that taints me with its alluring idolatry
bombards the white coast
until in its umber fusillade
I lose my footing on the cliffside ruins.
The erstwhile citadel where I sit paralyzed
is pared to one wall, refusing to acknowledge
the blood it has witnessed
and the three walls and roof
once making it shelter.
It hollers hallelujah over the precipice
in a voice failing to mask its desperation.
And the Aegean answers in its usual monotone:
endurance forever keeps you
a pen’s distance from your author.
IV.
Those knives in the sand
we long ago planted
and prayed for roots.
I have forgotten where not to step.
Blood could be anywhere
and its possibility scars me
more than any gash on the sole.
Sand swallows,
dries anything poured upon it.
But fear stems from being
that one exception,
whom love utterly devastates,
whose flesh although laved by sea salt
may never fully heal.
V.
There is nothing but sea
and its one voice
tirelessly begs me to shut up.
Tyrants and authors
and knowledge of more than self
shade beneath the same stone,
sleeping curled with a serpent,
where sun cannot spread.
This moment is a war
between all those preceding,
slamming together like molecules,
grouping and parting
and regrouping with others.
No wonder the sea’s unity
seems a simplified sham,
an honest politician, beautiful and naïve,
who has yet to lead more than himself.
I’ve fallen prey to various shell games
and somehow choosing correctly
still uncovers empty table.
Should I accept this voice,
this individual moment
on its own terms,
of which I am ignorant
and must trust in myself?
In my bird-hearted love of this country
when perched amongst its glories,
stones, old tears (Dear Oia,
to be on the ground is simply not me),
a restless animosity unfurls
and I’m more of past and future
and the fear within love
when, aloft, I freely scan
the entirety of its landscape.
Iceland
Unlike in sand, feet sink into this course
camel hair grass and remain
like fingerprints at a crime scene.
There is no sea to shave our markings
every high tide, no trees to discard
their orange leaves, no clock
ever-ready to pause lost thought
and retrace hurried steps.
These sprouting green cocoons simply give
under my weight and as they spread
from mountain to shore
I can see where I’ve been.
Temperatures rocket and fall so quickly here,
welting the fields. Night comes down
wearing a volcanic, toothy grin.
I walk without eyes
slow and heavy
reading memory’s frail odes in the silent streams
and vocal wind, in the fat pleasantry
of the thief of time’s hands.
With nowhere to go I haven’t been, I go
always to where I have.
My words are my footsteps
slow and heavy
tonguing the sore on my heart, looking back.
Poetry sought me here at the end of things
but I had abandoned mirror for touch
and windows for the scent of moss.
I had run to the land of absolutes
seeking naught but breath and solitude.
Yet the grass kept track
of all my failures and fears and triumphs
reminding I am alive again
suffocating by the wavering sword of my shadow
and feigning blindness
to roll in the mud of emptiness, muteness.
So I’ve now gone the way of grass
and tried to learn and failed
to try and learned to fail
and as I begin the long journey back
open eyes scanning what I’ve lost
I see beside each footprint a space
where I never stepped.
On These Warmer Nights of Sleepwalking
On these warmer nights of sleepwalking
lamplight brings the body’s thin sheath
closer to a song that like words born of soul
belong neither to the object nor the poet.
By dreaming I suppose I always meant moving
and by detachment I grip the balustrade tightest.
Down below all Danubes converge
and everything exhales but cannot see its breath
and that slight sweat lining a lip
is rainwater condensing and steaming the window
that eyes down the saint
with his back to the churchyard.
And Vienna is a city like any other illusion
and, eyes blindly agape, I see all things in life
lean into me, not into but through me
like a warning voice unheeded.
All is distant. All is moment
and then like moment is lost.
On the warmest nights
when the statues shed their clothes
and naked, suddenly all flaccid flesh
blushing, embarrassed at the artifice exposed,
beg the vagrants and sleepwalkers for water,
I am water for the world to replenish
the many moments in which finally I am song,
not a poet or illusion, but will awake never to remember.
National Anthem
Only when wheat has poached the day
do we rest,
under a sliver of moon hanging
tired as our heads
with great blue sparks
open and moist as our eyes.
We smile into the communal fire,
rubbing our red hands
warming our night
and talk like lonely madmen
or we don’t talk at all.
Both speech and silence massage
the deep aching spot
between limbs and soul,
as both our dreamt lives and real
bend to pure white exhaustion.
At times, one will sing
lift his sandpaper and flesh voice
up and out into the flames
and fields and sky, and history
remembers with its supple fist of iron.
At times, others join
this somber solo, at first
colliding like sea on rock,
like wet clothes on a washboard,
but soon all voices wrestle together
into a humble anthem
lifting up and out and becoming
more
than tired time-passing
beneath night’s heavy anchor
and the sharp blue sting
of a dying star.
Little Sun, Pinpricked Night
Little sun, pinpricked night,
you with the gray coat of souls
and black rings of years,
pale, thorn-tongued, whispering
up into a crest of air,
bellowing back down
to the blazing cloth of sea.
Witness my human attempts
to remain human
as you pull me inside
and drain me of the phosphorescent.
Silent, you wave beneath the flag
I ostentatiously wave to prove my breath
not a passing shower
but a flood to quicksand
the driest earth,
to glide like a steel blade
through the hourglass’ pink underbelly.
Larger and larger
I expand into your shape,
a vast, vermilion syllable.
I flood your sentence
with blue-black desire
and blink in your absence
as this beautiful half-death,
constructed as bone, ash, and cloud,
circles the periphery,
a bloodhound tracking nothing.
Oia Sequence
I.
The jewels you finger
while shading your eyes from the sun
are South African blood.
The mule you ride
up these winding island corridors,
the rocky path from sea to civilization,
will know death the moment you disembark.
I purchased those jewels
as promises of love and future
and paid the old, whip-handed mule driver
with my coins. And of the half-heart
proffered you, make me forget
their mouthfuls of sand and the stones
lodged in their lungs
and the useless promises of past-
each wound carefully disguised
as romanticism
and voraciously swallowed.
My heart’s other half,
the one that despises theatrics,
remembers my actions
as water remembers the stones it’s dislodged.
II.
While spying the caldera and such destructions
history cannot erase,
rock scars, disrupted mythologies,
ships cast to the black winds,
I momentarily fail in my obligation to death.
The underfoot mewing of disfigured, stray kittens.
The hollering pawners of watercolor landscapes
existing as earth and sea and fire all around.
The surging tourists with their instinct of rodents
and a brick scarcely eluding my skull.
All these frivolous tears indenture me
to a love and a desperate gripping
to these ends born severed,
as if I could weave together the world
and two by two each walk the thread,
perfectly balanced, never alone.
Never again, I promised the sea.
And ever since I have doubled my efforts
to diminish that trudging fear
that tucks between my legs at night
and when my voice dies within the wind
whipping me into tomorrow,
a blind rush,
a single moment I did not cringe,
a promise broken upon the lip.
III.
The one who writes me has broken for lunch
and with feet and head and fate all my own
I have forgotten the art of movement.
Oia’s polished gold coin of sunset
that taints me with its alluring idolatry
bombards the white coast
until in its umber fusillade
I lose my footing on the cliffside ruins.
The erstwhile citadel where I sit paralyzed
is pared to one wall, refusing to acknowledge
the blood it has witnessed
and the three walls and roof
once making it shelter.
It hollers hallelujah over the precipice
in a voice failing to mask its desperation.
And the Aegean answers in its usual monotone:
endurance forever keeps you
a pen’s distance from your author.
IV.
Those knives in the sand
we long ago planted
and prayed for roots.
I have forgotten where not to step.
Blood could be anywhere
and its possibility scars me
more than any gash on the sole.
Sand swallows,
dries anything poured upon it.
But fear stems from being
that one exception,
whom love utterly devastates,
whose flesh although laved by sea salt
may never fully heal.
V.
There is nothing but sea
and its one voice
tirelessly begs me to shut up.
Tyrants and authors
and knowledge of more than self
shade beneath the same stone,
sleeping curled with a serpent,
where sun cannot spread.
This moment is a war
between all those preceding,
slamming together like molecules,
grouping and parting
and regrouping with others.
No wonder the sea’s unity
seems a simplified sham,
an honest politician, beautiful and naïve,
who has yet to lead more than himself.
I’ve fallen prey to various shell games
and somehow choosing correctly
still uncovers empty table.
Should I accept this voice,
this individual moment
on its own terms,
of which I am ignorant
and must trust in myself?
In my bird-hearted love of this country
when perched amongst its glories,
stones, old tears (Dear Oia,
to be on the ground is simply not me),
a restless animosity unfurls
and I’m more of past and future
and the fear within love
when, aloft, I freely scan
the entirety of its landscape.