Stephen J. Williams

Blog posts

  • How we sleep

    How do we sleep while our beds are burning?— Midnight Oil

    This particular white-fella, rather podgy,
    over-employed, committed unionist
    and Nikon-owner, gets to a time of life
    (not even thirty) thinking about superannuation
    and which plan is best for safe retirement.

    I cringe through the whole year,
    complain quietly of terrible excess
    in times restraint is hard to bear, and
    manage some murmurings about “the Treaty”
    — but that’s all. So, how do I sleep?

    This far, I must admit, it’s been easy:
    buffered by green suburbs, relative riches
    and silence, I could not fail in ignorance.
    Some excel in it, are proud to destroy,
    build on the ruins, and have no fear to rest with bones.

    I have slept by forgetting.
    Without pills or drugs, dope or whiskey, to sleep
    it is enough simply not to think,
    as though a thought or word
    would make the whole house burn.

  • In my watchmaker’s hands

    Showing my palm to the watchmaker’s tongue
    He licks the time-line right down
    The crease of my present senses and

    The clock stops just there.

    Now, I take or leave god
    Depending on the weather
    And, like most of us,
    Consume astrology in small doses
    To guess at twists of plot in life.
    As for clocks, there’s no mystery,
    They are purely functional:
    We tell them what to mean.

    Like nothing else, these sudden stillnesses of love
    Make me wonder,

    Not what spring keeps the galaxy spinning,

    Rather, how
    In my watchmaker’s hands time dies,
    How my stupid body lives!

  • Idea for a garden

    The beds in this ward are for certain death,
for diseases even dear relatives fear and hate.
There are new lovers, though, as well as old,
who make a plan for paradise in this hell.
          When sun fell on a light sheet covering
one man’s ribs, where carers look
for signs of life, small movement, someone
had the idea for a garden.
                    Friends brought small bushes
that will be always green, signifying faith, endurance,
bulbs for sudden happiness, stones and pebbles,
showing some things never change.
          They gather there to make a prayer
of simple actions. Some to the God outsiders say
forsakes them, some to the hope small happiness
will last, they sing in whispers, put wishes to the edge
of lips, where a wind takes their words away.

  • Dimitris is not dead

    Another poet wrote, unpacking myths
    And colors for dying days, of meeting him,
    That special feeling, and published
    To confirm undying admiration.

    Last night, though, Dimitris was at dinner,
    Wearing his old, aqua beach trousers,
    Comparing recipes for home-made bread—
    “Two parts wholemeal, one of plain …”

    “The tasteless olives, promising to look at,
    Should be jarred in vinegar, water, a little oil.”
    “And Greek bishops—the word for them
    Is despot—have reigned a thousand, stable years.”

    Who knows if he will live that long, taking his pipe
    Out to the porch, smoking under a quiet April?
    A little thin, perhaps, but as for ‘death’—
    He has thought of it, and then thought better.

    Originally published in Quadrant, December 1989. Dimitris Tsaloumas died in February 2016 on Leros in Greece where he was born.

  • Domestic suburban vignette

    “40, and the kids at university,
    I will sit at home all day listening to Hinch
    and reading Derrida; myself in the mirror,
    the perfect picture of bourgeois complacency,
    the daze of my life as incomprehensible
    as a bar of soap.  —And, of course, I will want
    something indefinable and leave my husband to get it …”

    40, and the kids at university,
    I won’t take shit from anyone
    wearing a uniform or wielding a B.A.
    who bursts through the door and wants to rape me
    (phallogocentrically speaking);
    punishment for writing about mirrors
    or old photos of my mother.

    I’ll write about firemen and policemen,
    the axes and truncheons of daily life,
    the ease of speech in Newtown cafés,
    about the light at the end of poetry
    and the bizarre satisfactions of golf;
    I’ll write about all those things, like one
    who knows their true meaning, when pigs fly.

    “And having left him for good, for the thing
    I wanted, there will only be that square of light,
    the mother of myself that all mirrors are,
    bringing more, little, unhappy Mes into the world;
    more ghastly women, multiplying like rabbits
    before their mirrors: Lacanian, suburban, neurotic …”

    I’ll be here, because he’s there, away from him,
    nestling in the comfortable poetry of distance
    between us: because it’s not just that book
    by de Sade my husband taunts me with—
    it’s the whole damned city  and its monuments
    to poet-soldiers of commerce—I want distance from,
    we need to escape from, finally.

    Who will circumscribe me, size me up,
    push me out, out here, then call it wilderness?
    The boiling kettle, boiling over,
    tumble-dryer, its revolutions,
    this dangerous Sunday supplément, that is me,
    that so disturbs them and makes them go limp
    and fall over themselves with desire,

    sits every morning with the smell of coffee
    in front of the window, practising domesticity,
    and perfecting it, against every possibility of violence
    or dissatisfaction.  It’s an idea that tears down buildings
    and won’t allow the city of men to sleep at night.

    Originally published in Nocturnal Submissions, Number 1, 1991

  • Dreaming of zeppelins

    for Barbara Giles, when aged six

    If it’s a cold war, the telegraph wires
    Sing the air with a dull whir.

    Fearing the thing that creeps, or
    Numbers mounting without control,

    No wonder our sleep’s uneasy.
    Young as we are, we know

    A death on the wind is coming
    And what our dreams shall reap, we’ve sown.

    Originally published in Fine Line, 1988

  • Ishmael

    Sarah was adamant
    the other boy should not share
    Isaac’s fame and history.

    “God has blessed
    our own son as you must
    now favor him alone.”

    Uncertain, needing guidance,
    Abraham dreamt
    of God’s other nation,

    and offered the boy
    to all uncertainty,
    the wilderness of doubting

    God lives everywhere.
    What was the farewell speech?
    “Though men would die there,

    “He has promised
    you will be great.
    So you will be great.

    “I must not doubt it,
    but I do; and I will cry,
    enough to make a desert green

    “for you.”  For Ishmael,
    a long time Abraham’s only hope,
    he may have promised anything.

    …

    Mother and son leave
    with bread, a flask of water,
    and promises.

    Not Abraham’s but mother’s
    weeping saves Ishmael:
    Men build a well, nature fills it.

    “We’ll be more practical,
    make the promise happen
    with work, not wanting.”

    They master it together:
    Ishmael, the archer,
    Hagar, the matchmaker.

    “What a place
    To make a nation!
    But the ingredients are simple.”

    …

    When sons return to their father’s death,
    burying Abraham at Machpelah,
    voices echo in the dark.

    “Father, father”
    on the lips of the boys:
    they might make the same prayer …

    “You tempted us to hate you:
    me crying under the knife,
    me cast to doubt.”

    But the prayer made by Isaac
    to a father’s history and fame
    is also his own to live in.

    Ishmael whispers
    the first confession.
    “What shall I do

    “About forgiveness, father?
    You start the story,
    leaving me without end.

    “In my new life
    I am rich with everything
    except belonging.

    “I do not hate or love.
    My life is the plain, the sun;
    and for my heart, an arrow.”

    Originally published in Studio, 1990