Young Love (IX)

William Carlos Williams


What about all this writing?

O "kiki"
O miss margaret jarvis
the backhandspring

I: clean
clean
clean: yes..New York

Wrigley's, appendicitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup--

Either that or a bullet!

Once
anything might have happened
You lay relaxed on my knees--
the starry night
spread out warm and blind
above the hospital--

Pah!

It is unclean
which is not straight to the mark--

In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion--
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning--

What to want?

Drunk we go forward surely
Not I

beds, beds, beds
elevators, fruit, night tables
breasts to see, white and blue--
to hold in the hand, to nozzle

It is not onion soup
Your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces

Everything
--windows, chairs
obscenely drunk, spinning--
white, blue, orange
--hot with our passion

wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air!

But what would you have?

All I said was:
there, you see, it is broken

stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round you--

I watched.

You sobbed, you beat your pillow
you tore your hair
you dug your nails into your sides

I was your nightgown
I watched!

Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city--
flying apart at his approaches

but I merely
caress you curiously

fifteen years ago
and you still
go about the city, they say
patching up sick school children