kora in hell:

by william carlos williams 

IMPROVISATIONS XVIII. 

1

How deftly we keep love from each other. It is no trick at 
all: the movement of a cat that leaps a low barrier. You have 
if the truth be known loved only one man and that was before 
my time. Past him you have never thought nor desired to think. 
In his perfections you are perfect. You are likewise perfect in 
other things. You present to me the surface of a marble. And 
I, we will say, loved also before your time. Put it quite 
obscenely. And I have my perfections. So here we present 
ourselves to each other naked. What have we effected ? Say 
we have aged a little together and you have borne children. We 
have in short thriven as the world goes. We have proved fertile. 
The children are apparently healthy. One of them is even 
whimsical and one has an unusual memory and a keen eye. 
But It is not that we have not felt a certain rumbling, a certain 
stirring of the earth but what has it amounted to? Your first 
love and mine were of different species. There is only one way 
out. It is for me to take up my basket of words and for you to 
sit at your piano, each his own way, until I have, if it so be that 
good fortune smile my way, made a shrewd bargain at some fair 
and so by dint of heavy straining supplanted in your memory the 
brilliance of the old armhold. Which is impossible. Ergo: I 
am a blackguard. 

The act is disclosed by the imagination of it. But of first 
importance is to realize that the imagination leads and the deed 
comes behind. First Don Quixote then Sancho Panza. So that 
the act, to win its praise, will win it in diverse fashions according 
to the way the imagination has taken. Thus a harsh deed will 
sometimes win its praise through laughter and sometimes through 
savage mockery, and a deed of simple kindness will come to its 
reward through sarcastic comment. Each thing is secure in its 
own perfections. 

2 

After thirty years staring at one true phrase he discovered 
that its opposite was true also. For weeks he laughed in the grip 
of a fierce self derision. Having lost the falsehood to which he d 
fixed his hawser he rolled drunkenly about the field of his 
environment before the new direction began to dawn upon his 
cracked mind. What a fool ever to be tricked into seriousness. 
Soft hearted, hard hearted. Thick crystals began to shoot 
through the liquid of his spirit. Black, they were: branches that 
have lain in a fog which now a wind is blowing away. Things 
move. Fatigued as you are watch how the mirror sieves out the 
extraneous : in sleep as in waking. Summoned to his door by a 
tinkling bell he looked into a white face, the face of a man 
convulsed with dread, saw the laughter back of its drawn alert 
ness. Out in the air: the sidesplitting burlesque of a sparkling 
midnight stooping over a little house on a sandbank. The city at 
the horizon blowing a lurid red against the flat cloud. The moon 
masquerading for a tower clock over the factory, its hands in a 
gesture that, were time real, would have settled all. But the 
delusion convulses the leafless trees with the deepest appreciation 
of the mummery : insolent poking of a face upon the half-lit win 
dow from which the screams burst. So the man alighted in the 
great silence, with a myopic star blinking to clear its eye over his 
hat top. He comes to do good. Fatigue tickles his calves and 
the lower part of his back with solicitous fingers, strokes his feet 
and his knees with appreciative charity. He plunges up the dark 
steps on his grotesque deed of mercy. In his warped brain an 
owl of irony fixes on the immediate object of his care as if it 
were the thing to be destroyed, guffaws at the impossibility of 
putting any kind of value on the object inside or of even reversing 
or making less by any other means than induced sleep which is 
no solution the methodical gripe of the sufferer. Stupidity 
couched in a dingy room beside the kitchen. One room stove- 
hot, the next the dead cold of a butcher s ice box. The man 
leaned and cut the baby from its stem. Slop in disinfectant, roar 
with derision at the insipid blood stench: hallucination comes to 
the rescue on the brink of seriousness: the gas-stove flame is 
starblue, violets back of L Orloge at Lancy. The smile of a 
spring morning trickles into the back of his head and blinds the 
eyes to the irritation of the poppy red flux. A cracked window 
blind lets in Venus. Stars. The hand-lamp is too feeble to have 
its own way. The vanity of their neck stretching, trying to be 
large as a street-lamp sets him roaring to himself anew. And 
rubber gloves, the color of moist dates, the identical glisten and 
texture : means a ballon trip to Fez. So one is a ridiculous savior 
of the poor, with fatigue always at his elbow with a new jest, 
the newest smutty story, the prettiest defiance of insipid pretences 
that cannot again assert divine right nonsensical gods that are 
fit to lick shoes clean : and the great round face of Sister Palagia 
straining to keep composure against the jaws of a body louse. 
In at the back door. We have been a benefactor. The cross 
laughter has been denied us but one cannot have more than the 
appetite sanctions. 

3 

Awake early to the white blare of a sun flooding in sidewise. 
Strip and bathe in it. Ha, but an ache tearing at your throat and 
a vague cinema lifting its black moon blot all out. There s no 
walking barefoot in the crisp leaves nowadays. There s no 
dancing save in the head s dark. Go draped in soot; call on 
modern medicine to help you: the coal man s blowing his thin 
dust up through the house ! Why then, a new step lady ! I ll 
meet you you know where o the dark side! Let the wheel 
click.  

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which 
coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the 
screen at the movies. Somewhere there appears to be a mal 
adjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of 
unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual 
things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow 
dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not 
always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.