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For William Carlos Williams
by Ed Bennett

"new music is a new mind."
       
William Carlos Williams

The words were never clearer,
the image of things before us
that were never more than background

white chickens
wheelbarrows
those sweet plums

they were afterthoughts
to most of us,
poems to you
caught in a web of language,
the unique tongue
'tis of thee and we.

And as we spoke
the broken cadence of distant kings
you heard the freedom
of a new symposium,
asphodels and Icarus
walking in the daylight
of a poet's fertile pen.

We envy your words,
recite them from primers
that speak of a golden age
but it is the ear
always cocked for the pulse of living,
the eye that seeks
the common object
or thought

to be swept into an artifice,
a hymn to the here and now,
the joy of a voice singing
with the lilt of one's touch,
the caress of living
in the ebb and flow.


 


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