Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      April 23, 2024The ReturnKenny Williams

      When I returned to earth after forty thousand years
      there were no more graves, no more cathedrals.
      No public parks, no public. I looked everywhere
      and couldn’t find a single statue of a hero put up
      by a committee. There was simply none of that sadness
      that can only be satisfied by a dose of dry-eyed Mahler,
      sex in a sand trap or hunters in the snow. There were,
      understand, no elevators. There were no jailbirds
      to be prayed for, no thieves broken backward
      across the tops of their crosses, no city walls or citadels
      hung by a thread over the pit of the sky.
      There had been a Russian documentary film
      about a man gone in search of the birthplace of the wind,
      but I couldn’t find it. There wasn’t the hospital garden
      where, one cold Sunday morning, a man came to cut roses
      in the face of all prohibitions, posted and implied,
      for his wife, a girl he’d married ages ago, out of revenge
      against the woman he loved, whose throat he feasted on
      while her husband was in Honolulu with his lover,
      who was working on her PhD in there’s-nobody-left-to-know-what,
      probably something to do with marine mammals,
      not a single specimen of which could I track down
      to confirm or deny the rose-garden scene in its strange
      un-hearable tongue. You must understand:
      when I returned to earth after forty thousand years
      there was not one single traffic circle or comic strip,
      no Lucy diagnosing Charlie Brown or throwing
      Schroeder’s piano in a tree. No one to take mental notes
      on how a black-haired bitch handles competition.
      No competition. No Darwin taking it all back
      on his deathbed. No rest cures, glory holes, horsefly bites.
      Not so much as a scrap of Brussels lace I might describe
      in this report, in pointless triumph. Not so much
      as a girl dressed like a garden statue, raising a birdcage
      with no bird in it, like a lantern in the light of day.
      In my mind and yours that cage tapers up into a copper nipple
      with a ring through it. My friends, hear me when I tell you
      there wasn’t so much as a dog to sniff me out.

      from #38 - Winter 2012

      Kenny Williams

      “All my poems are about the same thing: human duration, in time, between the Fall and the Last Day. ‘The Return’ seems to be some sort of exception, taking place after the Last Day, though very much shot through with its clarifying light. What’s more, the more I think about it, ‘The Return’ really describes two returns: the return to earth after forty thousand years and the return to report what wasn’t found there. Which of these two returns the title refers to depends, I guess, on the angle from which you read the poem. I’ve always been obsessed with the emptied earth needing a witness to its emptiness, and as I was writing the poem I had to grapple with the complication of that witness’s own need for an audience that would 1) share his frame of Western culture reference and 2) be real. I hold degrees from the University of Virginia and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I own and operate The Fan Sitter, a pet care business, in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia.”

      →

      Related