Arts in Society

Poet's Sampler: Phillip B. Williams

November 3, 2015

Phillip B. Williams, Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Nov 3, 2015

Williams observes, with courage and fragility, his own mortality and promise.

The poetic line intersects and vivisects syllables, dust, and bones in the poetry of Phillip B. Williams. He invites his audience into an intimacy that is brutal and yet inestimably generous in its confession and compassion: “I have not been long in the meaning of shadow, the one shared bruise of all things.” To experience his poetry is to encounter a lucid, unmitigated humanity, a voice for whom language is inadequate, yet necessarily grasped, shaped, and consumed. His devout and excruciating attention to the line and its indispensible music fuses his implacable understanding of words with their own shadows.

Williams, whose debut solo collection, Thief in the Interior, will be published early next year, examines a notion of self-inflicted trespass: “it is the mind that imagines the shadow having its own language, its own dark idiom translating the body onto whatever surface will hold it. The shadow is the mind, the mind’s work, seen.” Bared as flower and fang, revealed as both prey and predator, the poet’s voice circles and interrogates what is nameless and unspeakable. Williams pulls his readers through profane fires, urging us to turn back to see what we have sacrificed, what has been taken, what has been denied, lost, given away, and what lies beyond comprehension. It is that comprehension and its risk, startling and tactile, that makes Williams’s voice original and revelatory. He observes, with courage and fragility, his own mortality and perilous promise: “The boy too stubborn to reveal his face. / Or too afraid of what his face reveals. / Was beauty thrown there, a field shocked / with black irises and the canvas, / the canvas not yet ready?”

—Rachel Eliza Griffiths

The River

for Rekia Boyd

In the Book of Grief, a woman wrapped in black

scarves walks from the river bottom and says her own

name to the dusk. Horseflies comb

her hair this late afternoon to the tune of beauty

cricketing through the chamomile, distending

a frog’s yellow throat. A ring of rust

draws a mouth on the woman’s neck.

When she leans back the red crease loosens

as if to crack open and say:

Who summoned me? Who thinks my gaze

is a wheel of thread to sew wings onto backs

that never had wings? Who traced the maze

sunset makes on the water to lead me back?

The air is caustic here and rotten milk

spills from the flowerbeds. The earth is iron-

stenched. There is blood like unwound silk

ribboning from a body. Whose child has learned

their history? Who’s found the door but can’t get out?

Whose words do I perform from my sealed mouth?

And the frogs fall quiet in the riverbed.

And the crickets detune their shins

in the chamomile disintegrating quickly

as it came. It was too easy a song

and so must begin again, the lyric unwinding

toward a destination not already-fulfilled,

the one to fulfill it touching the dead

with unwashed hands, the unwashed mind

scouring again the moment for merchandise.

Horseflies and their diligent limbs have failed,

the desk lamp—not made into sun or

moon—just the light, this time,

and its heat refuting elegy. And the river woman

asks what in this now, and asks

whose to say, and the sage of her voice

leaves my mouth, the inquiry the lyric,

the impetus, that working organ

running down as rivers do.

Inside, a thousand fish like specter-arrows

swim hectored by waves, their patterns

make turning back a moving forward

in the current. Inside me I carry the image of Boyd

and ask permission to begin again,

to say the words death in context,

violence with the angel of vengeance

at the corner of my lips but

what now with this anger? What now

with these thousand fish in this river and

the river woman waiting patiently

for instructions, her yellow dress just now

appearing, the black scarves not for her

but for me and I don’t need that lace,

or those seams sealed to keep

their secret massacres. Let them fade

like frogs, like an intention. I hand over

the image to the river. I watch it fold

into its own fish, unable to distinguish it

from the other, glistening arguments that turn,

go nowhere; turn away. Am gone.

Neither Conquest Nor Surrender

I have not been long in the meaning of shadow, the one shared bruise of

all things. Light in its truest mood. I had come to know this masklessness

in my own restless mornings. I found my shadow in the pit of myself,

merely a knot of what it could become, until light pulled my form from me

and gave it to my shadow. It keeps quiet, working harder than the mind to

make real what is not, though it is the mind that imagines the shadow

having its own language, its own dark idiom translating the body onto

whatever surface will hold it. The shadow is the mind, the mind’s work,

seen. I roll over

and see him sleeping next to me, having forgotten he was there, the

wrinkled cave of him now locked, almost. I sit upright on the bed and face

the wall that holds my shadow like an opened door.

Through which the impossible multitudes of the hidden self swiftly pass.

Canticle to the Tune of a Waistband’s Slap

The big Black buck’s pants were pulled up but

the officer’s bullets still pelted. Theory 1: the penis

is impossible to imagine. No, the penis is always

possible. Theory 2: the penis’s profile is always

reason to profile even though the penis

is improbably seen through a jean’s denim veil?

No, not the penis, the pulse of a Black body

makes even the New Blacks gag. Who’ll placate

this panicky sect of a sable population

who think “the booty don’t lie” is propaganda

for the end of their lives, the officer with the gun

astounded into cruelty. Imagine empty suits gin-

fanned to a river bottom, hollow button-up shirts

Tuskegee’d into silence, the shape of a Khoisan woman

renamed for a planet and propped up for exhibition.

Negro me this. Negro me that. Whose shame

is this anyway? Why am I afraid to hug

my mother outside with police nearby? A person

can only manhandle so many lies told about them.

Lovely leather belt, keep my pants high

and the Devil low. Make white fear

disappear. Let the assumed bric-a-brac

of my attitude not make them brick a Black

man and shout “Justice!” In my poppa bag

of tricks I stay winning, Blue Magic

hair grease to stiffen the tragic curls

of my scalp. Every part of me whirls

in retribution. “Vengeance is mine” said

the lord and lady with the most ducats.

Can you dig it? An older white man saw me

in my vest and tie, my blazer and good leather

shoes with the loud soles and asked me to

park his car. The Angel of Valet was cruel

that evening. Had me coddling respectability,

thinking “damn this useless good hair, damn these

loud-ass shoes that echo like a blackface plea:

Raise ya pants, you foo’! Here come

de’ massa eye beholdin’! You’se wicked,

you’se anyhow wicked an’ cain’t help it none.”

Though My Wings are Broken, They Still Make Me Animal

after Paul Celan

I sleep reeking musk of leopards in love. My home is an amazement of leaves. Their

shadows

paint weapons against me. If they stir, I am impaled by green laughter.

Bildungsroman

For what reason other than to be his,

to signal the need in me to house

his shiver-light. Lit. His kiss

led to the dead boy of me. Embedded:

the slaughter, preserved as a swamp

preserves, revealed as an aftershock

reveals what can fail its height

and must. I saw. Was shook by

the rot in me that lifted like a skirt.

To be his. He arrowed

a fear in me. And did slay. I took

that drink, throat bullseyed

into obey, and—deserving, un . . .—was revised.

[_________________]

for…

at night they pulled me into the dark they yelled

I spoke clearly through wool over my head the night

was clear moonlight against the wool their shadows

lengthened by flashlight their pipes shown through

moonlight bloodied edgeless

they removed the wool bag

to see my face to see my face they tilted it beneath

flashlight and counted what teeth remained what

white one of them had a son his face tilted at night

to my lips his teeth were white his face

like night would he recognize this wound this me

I smelled rain with what was left of my nose

with what was left of my nose I bled into my mouth

with what was left of my mouth I spoke my name

could they

hear my voice breaking blood to speak could they

hear me over truck engine over asphalt hissing beneath

my skin pulled my mouth my nose my blood without its body

dragged down a road where my blood made a road within

a road my mouth a mile back my tongueless name my foot

in a ditch my hands one waits for the other to lift like dust

Failure of Tombs

Boy in the taut chamber of declivities.

The boy too stubborn to reveal his face.

Or too afraid of what his face reveals.

Was beauty thrown there, a field shocked

with black irises and the canvas,

the canvas not yet ready? Or the wind

had ridden away countenance? Or was light

the culprit of the boy’s near-fetal curl

in the staircase where to rise and to lower occur?

Slow. Deliberate.

Light creeping through the glassed door behind.

Light through the vestibule belligerent and vacant.

Light the desire to search and see and find.

Light itself a man through the door.

Light the taking and the boy, white linen

shrouding his sex, not for modesty, not

for shame but near it, nearer the advent

of the hard of him being located by the man

in the shapelessness of light. Sometimes,

men come that way, wide as history

through the door and just as violent,

their violence hidden until someone stays

too long. Boy hidden in the slim dark,

his body learning how small

it can become like a house he remembers

after a flood took it, perpetual rain

bloating itself into a sea that takes

what stands. Or the boy is about to

stand, make of his mind a tortured capital,

Corinthian. The onslaught already-occurred.

The man slips back into the wild,

into the unseen, which is the world

blurred until the blur is what is—is all

that can ever be—true:

there is a wilderness

and in it light is said to lift from rot

as though a shirt, tattered, tearing further

from a body mud preserves, heart stunned

between beats where fear had most set the pace.

Following the light is said to be like following

a self you’ve long forgotten until, pot-

of-gold,

the fiction inhales, the self

all bone, fanged,

its holey wings flexed to take off,

to take you with it. So

the wind after all.

November 03, 2015

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Poet's Sampler: Phillip B. Williams

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