John Sibley Williams
Lineage
This field is always a bullet
away from emptied, so maybe
it makes sense horses
are measured in hands, bourbon in fingers, the earth
by how much of it we own.
Rail tracks are only as good as
the countries blurring by,
the mountains collapsed to make room for passage.
The only rainbows
independent of the weather leak
from punctured gas lines.
Crows, murders of them. Roots what we plant to replace
the roots we've pulled up.
Once they find another earth
to replace ours,
how long will it wild in our hands before we close them
into fists?
and my children keep fireflies in bell jars
as if life is some failing experiment.
They aren't wrong, exactly. Just not right. & I watch them watch the lights
spark brilliantly, awe-struck, briefly, dimming.
A Safe Distance
Matted fur. Bared teeth. A few stray
howls skip out over a moonless field
like stones. Ripples lessen as the song
extends beyond itself. I'm lucky to be
close enough to ruin to hear what it is
the ruined request yet a few yards too
far for it to hurt.
×
Torn skin, bloodied. Pulled from the body,
clouds of wool tumble & snag
on a fence meant to keep things out.
Though it's my job to scrub the earth
clean of itself, my heart is filled with
distant hoof beats. Not tears, the intimacy
of tears.
×
Stay a safe distance,
my grandfather says; let the world in,
up to a point. Though nothing can be
denied entrance forever, I try to remain
unmoved: by the dogs & what dogs do:
the bees dying off: all his nightly prayers
drained of heaven. I try to forget the fire
×
& in trying to forget the spreads.
Something has to be put in the foreground
for scale, lest the landscape extend forever.
Hay bale. Just one unbroken horse. A barn,
even burning; the smoke enough to trace
a trajectory to sky. I cannot tell if that's my
father out there or a storm-stripped sycamore.
If my mother is with him, or a mound
of mown grass. & so on. If life is art & art
is perspective, give me one good reason
not to doubt what I'm seeing. Brushstrokes
vague into horizon. Horizon a wrung-out
sheet without taut lines to hang from. Not
enough distance to say if what I'm feeling is
intimacy.
In the New World
Fallen kingdom, overtaken first by rot
then weeds then construction of the new
face that reflects the same sun at exactly
the same angle as the first. Everything
the color of lightning zigzagging down
to touch, so gently, burning, a crown
of trees. Park trees: the kind enclosed
by streets, just enough wildness to take
photos of & say wish you were here.
We've always been here. Vandalized
& vandalizing. So submissive as to call
our genuflecting dominance. This is our domain: baptism of glass, altar of glass.
All things holding our images: holy.
Every morning the same unshared bed,
same well-lit view of a newly christened city.
Of the thousand & one ways we pardon
ourselves, none of them stay the night.
We never even learn their first names.
Incidental Light
It's not that wounded dogs are easier to love
or that we see ourselves in them buried
in their masters' whip-like shadow.
It's not so much that we own or are owned
by the dead that return each night to teach
us something about the frailty of eternity
& breath; how it's not all at once, as assumed,
the light takes time leaving us, bird by bird.
Not for lack of trying, but it's damn near impossible
to kill two birds with one stone or to wash ourselves
in another's blood. Perhaps we expect too much
of guilt, mercy, prayer, hindsight.
It's not that we're all orphans in the end. In the end,
our memories are all body & our bodies are trees
that will burn for as long as we let them.
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Blackwaters Prize,2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. An eleven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart- Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.