Kora in Hell: ImprovisationsWilliams, William Carlos
General
Kora in Hell: Improvisations
Williams, William Carlos
Prose poems
gods that are fit to lick shoes clean: and the great round face of Sister
Palagia straining to keep composure against the jaws of a body louse. In
at the back door. We have been a benefactor. The cross laughter has been
denied us but one cannot have more than the appetite sanctions.
3
Awake early to the white blare of a sun flooding in sidewise. Strip and
bathe in it. Ha, but an ache tearing at your throat—and a vague cinema
lifting its black moon blot all out. There’s no walking barefoot in
the crisp leaves nowadays. There’s no dancing save in the head’s dark.
Go draped in soot; call on modern medicine to help you: the coal man’s
blowing his thin dust up through the house! Why then, a new step lady!
I’ll meet you—you know where—o’ the dark side! Let the wheel click.
* * * * *
_In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming
between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the
movies. Somewhere there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would
be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative
qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross
vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this
will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can._
XIX.
1
Carry clapping bundles of lath-strips, adjust, dig, saw on a diagonal,
hammer a thousand ends fast and discover afterward the lattice-arbor
top’s two clean lines in a dust of dew. There are days when leaves have
knife’s edges and one sees only eye-pupils, fixes every catchpenny in a
shop window and every wire against the sky but—goes puzzled from vista to
vista in his own house staring under beds for God knows what all.
* * * * *
_A lattice screen say fifty feet long by seven high, such a thing as
is built to cut off some certain part of a yard from public view, is
surprisingly expensive to put up. The wooden strips alone, if they are
placed at all close together must be figured solid, as if it were a board
fence. Then there are the posts, the frames, the trimming, the labor and
last of all the two coats of paint. Is it a wonder the artisan cannot
afford more than the luxury of these calculations._
2
Imperceptibly your self shakes free in all its brutal significance, feels
its subtle power renewed and abashed at its covered lustihood breaks
to the windows and draws back before the sunshine it sees there as before
some imagined figure that would be there if—ah if—But for a moment your
hand rests upon the palace window sill, only for a moment.
3
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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