Some poems about me trying to be William Carlos Williams

Precarious Still Life

You are a photograph

of breakfast,

a cool photo

of cracked eggs,

bones, butter, milk

and an empty glass

hanging, holding,

balancing plates

that want to fall,

but they don’t

Untitled

Well into the reserves of

our packs, there is one last can of beans

for us to share. When

we open it we will light an ochre

flame. Tomorrow we

will ask each other this question:

“How does it taste,

at the end?” Or was it just

the clippings of another bouquet?

Conflict

We were discussing how to fix the property damage,

the things our children broke. “After all,” we said,

“They were children in need of things to break.”

What did it matter that causality was infantile?

They responded in a way that was stubborn

but reasonable. We asked, “How much?”

and the shock

Later we were holding glasses of Sauvignon Blanc,

telling friends that neighborliness was dead.

But I am certain this was conflict in its most

righted form; that it served as a necessary barrier,

the overcoming of which made us feel slightly

freer,

but only as a sort of auditory illusion, whose repetition belies its progression.

The other side

I have seen a few videos of my niece, arms outstretched

to her sides, either an imitation of something she’d seen

or simply an impulse, an inherent knowledge in her

two-year-old body, running across a balance beam to my mom

on the other side, who, with already open arms, scoops

up my niece and kisses her; this encounter with love, an instance

of the many pleasures of useless joy, keeps me going, reminding

me of the gift, as opposed to the terror, of the other side –

the love of another – who is simply glad that you have arrived.