Produced by Meredith Bach and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Transcriber’s Note: Following the author’s intent, this e-text preserves the original’s spelling and stylistic features, including extra spacing between words (created using the U+2003 EM SPACE character ( ) three times in a row). IMPROVISATIONS By William Carlos Williams The Tempers Al Que Quiere! Kora in Hell [Illustration: Drawing by Stuart Davis] KORA IN HELL: IMPROVISATIONS BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS [Illustration] BOSTON THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY 1920 _Copyright, 1920, by_ THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY The Four Seas Press Boston, Mass., U. S. A. TO FLOSSIE PROLOGUE PROLOGUE THE RETURN OF THE SUN Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind. She seemed a shadow, stained with shadow colors, Swimming through waves of sunlight.… The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched. When my mother was in Rome on that rare journey forever to be remembered, she lived in a small pension near the Pincio gardens. The place had been chosen by my brother as one notably easy of access, being in a quarter free from confusion of traffic, on a street close to the park and furthermore the tram to the American Academy passed at the corner. Yet never did my mother go out but she was in fear of being lost. By turning to the left when she should have turned right, actually she did once manage to go so far astray that it was nearly an hour before she extricated herself from the strangeness of every new vista and found a landmark. There has always been a disreputable man of picturesque personality associated with this lady. Their relations have been marked by the most rollicking spirit of comradeship. Now it has been William, former sailor in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila, then Tom O’Rourck who has come to her to do odd jobs and to be cared for more or less when drunk or ill, their Penelope. William would fall from the grapearbor much to my mother’s amusement and delight and to his blustering discomfiture or he would stagger to the back door nearly unconscious from bad whiskey. There she would serve him with very hot and very strong coffee, then put him to scrubbing the kitchen floor into his suddy-pail pouring half a bottle of ammonia which would make the man gasp and water at the eyes as he worked and became sober.