Kora in Hell: ImprovisationsWilliams, William Carlos
General
Kora in Hell: Improvisations
Williams, William Carlos
Prose poems
_A young woman who had excelled at intellectual pursuits, a person of
great power in her sphere, died on the same night that a man was murdered
in the next street, a fellow of very gross behavior. The poet takes
advantage of this to send them on their way side by side without making
the usual unhappy moral distinctions._
V.
1
Beautiful white corpse of night actually! So the north-west winds of
death are mountain sweet after all! All the troubled stars are put to
bed now: three bullets from wife’s hand none kindlier: in the crown, in
the nape and one lower: three starlike holes among a million pocky pores
and the moon of your mouth: Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and all stars melted
forthwith into this one good white light over the inquest table,—the
traditional moth beating its wings against it—except there are two here.
But sweetest are the caresses of the county physician, a little clumsy
perhaps—_mais_—! and the Prosecuting Attorney, Peter Valuzzi and the
others, waving green arms of maples to the tinkling of the earliest
ragpicker’s bells. Otherwise—: kindly stupid hands, kindly coarse voices,
infinitely soothing, infinitely detached, infinitely beside the question,
restfully babbling of how, where, why and night is done and the green
edge of yesterday has said all it could.
* * * * *
_Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it
is a folly to accept it as a criticism of conduct. So to accept it is to
attempt to fit the emotions of a certain state to a preceding state to
which they are in no way related. Imagination though it cannot wipe out
the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses._
2
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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