The Poetry of William Hammett

Monday, September 30, 2024

Miracles

Water ripples into wine, the mountain levitates
before hiding in the sea like a disobedient stone
reprimanded by a harsh plow.

Loaves of bread sprout from branches
and fall to the ground like so many crumbs
intended for pilgrim pigeons.

Fish jackknife from water, flopping on the ground
in consternation, coming to a quiet, heaving rest,
their eyes looking blankly at the sky

for an answer that will never come.
The paralyzed, now restored,
look like whirligigs from a carnival,

dance moves bursting from marrow
of newly-straightened bones.
The fig tree crumbles into dust,

an old woman dying because she was told she must.
What are we to make of such odd goings-on,
as if reality were nothing but a spoon-bending trick

performed by the maker of movement,
the architect of eyes?
We gaze and slap our thighs, marvel at the energy

that was coiled in everything
from the moment suns began to shine.
We return to cooking meals, building rickety barns,

and driving nails into something
we cannot possibly explain.
The lunatic in the asylum, his voice quiet now,

begins a recitation of Shakespeare.
He alone knows the meaning of magic.
He alone is wise.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, September 18, 2024

The Peach

I feel the stiffness and creaking of my joints
and remember that my hair is gray
because blight has swept across a shock of wheat.

I recall many things I can only recall in fits and spurts.
But then I behold beauty with long black hair
longer than white legs smooth as ivory,

blue eyes in which I could drown,
lips as cliched as cherries but just as sweet.
It is outrageous, unfair, altogether wrong

that Grecian beauty painted so finely
with the colors of a pagan springtime fair
is beyond the reach of a straw skeleton

carrying decades of burden and wrinkled care.
Oh, to be a wizard and spin myself back in time
to drink the juice of a forbidden summer love,

backwards leapfrogging all of my mistakes
so that I again may taste my first sip of wine.
I then remember the sure reality—

the pun most surely intended—
in which I am always as strong and supple
as the sapling that does not bend,

a cavalier who pulls close the slender waist
for a consummate kiss that never ends.
Such fantasies for me are as solid

as mountains etched on sky.
Who is left to tell me that I cannot live
for the dreamy night rather than the day?

Who commands my brain to order itself
in this or that or some other way?
I jog along, stop, jump, click my heels,

and exactly when that happens
is not for you to know or me to say.
Years fall away so easily when biting into a peach.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, September 10, 2024

The Undiscovered Country

I have seen the blueprint for the wondrous daffodil,
have trod the well-worn path through the mountain pass
to see the peaceful village of natives by the sea.

I have seen the perimeter of now and all things familiar,
have seen Newton’s apple fall into Einstein’s well.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, says Qoheleth.

A gyroscope spins inside my skull,
the bones of which move like tectonic plates
farther and farther away from each other.

Before this continental drift can split me into epochs
and declare that my nine innings have come and gone,
I wish to see the Lady of the Lake in her watery abode.

to pull a crystal city from a black hole
which has swallowed the detritus of the universe
and crushed it into something new, as an oyster makes a pearl.

Why does the mushroom cap enable men to talk to God?
What’s behind the Buddha’s smile, and where is Shangri-La?
I wish to see reality stripped and standing nude.

Somewhere, the ocean rolls over the edge of the world.
Flatland surely exists, for possibility must everything include.
And now that I have gotten these weighty matters off my chest,

I hope you will dance with me before I turn to dust,
for that eventuality, too, has remained beyond my grasp.
In my undiscovered country, it most certainly is a must.

~William Hammett

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Friday, August 30, 2024

Threepenny Opera

It is the way forward, the light on the path
even when demons have mortgaged our souls.
It is plucking the soulmate with seamless synchronicity,
the one who is simply there and aware

that the universe has performed the wedding ceremony.
It is the one-ticket lottery winner,
the disease that was only a fleeting phantom
on the gray and black diagnostic film,

a pain in the side that decided to leave on the evening train.
Sunrise might come with a heavy price—
a hangover from hell or the end of a plague—
or the sun might simply slide into the sky

for kindness’ sake, no alarums required.
Life is often a threepenny opera,
the silent unfolding of the unsullied orchid,
a grand ball to which no royalty is squired.

It may be a gathering of merry paupers on the green,
the heavenly city without the nuisance of Armageddon time,
a straight shot of pure tequila
without the rim of salt or the taste of bitter lime.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Speaking of Mata Hari

Now that I have your attention, I have observations
suitable for the editor of a small-town newspaper.
The sparrow is singing on key

and appears to be in good spirits.
Cumulus clouds are under sail,
and one looks like a whale

happy to have evaded the harpoon.
The woman on the bench is receiving a proposal,
marriage being her destiny because her heart is strong.

We will check in on her many years from now
if that is not too much to ask of you.
The whooping children in the park have grown silent

because their batteries are low and it is afternoon,
allowing the man in the library across the street
to read his mystery novel in peace.

The librarian had satisfactory sex during lunch,
and radio applause from the house next door
leaked through a window when the deed was done.

The timing couldn’t have been better.
This part of the world stage is mostly quiet,
a phrase that doesn't appear in the Bible.

But now that I have your attention,
perhaps we should speak about Mata Hari,
or not, as the case may be.

She was falsely accused of treason,
but the news was buried on page six.
Things have a way of working out.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Hedy Lamarr, I Love You

Whipsmart bombshell, polymath queen,
brains and beauty, beauty and pains
projected on the silver but slanted screen.

You parted your black ocean down the middle,
and even Pharaoh wouldn’t cross so pure a line.
Maybe Byron or da Vinci would have some luck

scoring neon pinball tricks in your brain—
pickup poems with a Mona Lisa smile—
while dancing the rest of your bones on the Seine.

You always walked in beauty like the night,
a speaker of truth, an ear for the blind,
Dylan’s sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,

mystical artist, scientific find.
You frequency-hopped around a life well-lived,
inventing and acting and making love to the band,

and yet no one tossed a penny into your busker’s sieve.
The feds grabbed your patent for radar and chips,
but you played it close to the vest with lips

that kissed the juice from Hollywood and Vine—
you—fruit of all fruit, Eden’s divine.
Hedy, I love you, prophet and seer.

You were a thousand years ahead of your time
a thousand behind.
There’s no one who could touch you then,

few today who can hear your rhyme.
I wish I were Byron, da Vinci, or Bob.
We’d have a meeting of minds over Pharaoh’s divide.

That would be enough for me and for now.
Let it be, let it be, this Viennese waltz.
It will be our secret, you lyrical bride.

~William Hammett

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Monday, July 29, 2024

The Universe and Other Things

Nebula drift and Jupiter spin,
the Eiffel Tower reduced to a pin
affixing a doctor’s appointment to bulletin cork—

everything’s blended in geometry’s torque.
No longer mortal or venial sin,
only a day in the life in run-of-the-mill.

Broken hearts rush down a fire escape,
then dash madly to find lascivious lovers
to the third power who will kiss and tell

the odyssey of dancing on the small of the back
with fingers that know the teasing tarantella well.
Have you tried the absent leaning on a windowsill?

Everything is careening in the tumultuous now.
The future is spinning on the eternal roulette
while the past is world-weary from the blade of a plow.

Sing to this trumpeting or pluck the lute
as you would a lover to make music unmute.
Margaret’s not grieving the dead poet’s unleaving,

for the great bang and whistle-stop is spilling champagne
from magnums onto the fantail, fruited, alluvial plain.
I am in love with love, with the girl on the street

who has given me her address with a wink of the eye.
It is after the Flood and long after Eve.
Who cannot revel in ivy carving veins in the stone,

in the Medieval joust, in the court jester’s grin?
I swear by the Southern Cross now riding the sky
that everything is saved, that everything is right.

It is unnecessary to divide concrete this from arbitrary that.
All is pure potential, realized or not, Brahma’s self-revelation
rising from the well of a magician’s hat.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, July 17, 2024

A Winter's Eve

Snow falls on branches splayed like fingers,
falls on your dark hair, where it glistens
like a constellation drifting about your shoulders.

Icy stars are set like diamonds in the sky
of this dying year, though I don’t know why.
Perhaps your parted lips and silent breath

have chased away the clouds of this waking dream.
We are so much younger now,
the years having fallen away

as if someone had taken a lathe to time
and shaved away decades, day by day,
as we hold each other in a distant wood,

though I don’t where,
though I don’t know how.
Moonlight slides down the trunks of trees.

An owl hiding inside a hole in the thicket
tells us to kiss, and we do.
Despite the deep blue tones of a winter’s eve,

everything is new again, though not the same,
and the cold air in my lungs
is the energy and seamless soul of you.

The universe is reflected in your eyes,
all places, all things, all time,
but I know better than to question why.

I am content to remain in this moment
of death and rebirth, to rest within
a conversation that need not be spoken.

The evening is caught in time, is clear,
and we both know why,
and we both know why.

~William Hammett

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Monday, July 8, 2024

From time to time I must leave that which I know,
the daily routines of rise and come and go,
the floorboards that have been worn to sand,
the stairs that connect a firm grasp of life
to rooms of sleep and drifting, dreamy weather.

I leave solid footing for a flippant, waving hand.
I must walk across a cold field of brown heather
past a fourteenth century Scottish castle of gray stones
that have been knocked into crooked, crenelated teeth,
an empty scull sans brain sitting on the gray jetty.

There, I wait for zephyrs to turn foreboding into fair,
time and tide that will lead me to a less familiar where.
The slim horizon is a mistress I must divide,
ocean from sky, piercing virginity waiting to die
so that I may relish the other side of should or would,

climb mountains and drink wide rivers running
from a range hidden by a mist of mystery’s cunning.
I must speak with grasslands and converse with pilgrims
who evolved during Pangea’s prehistoric slide.
I will speak with Ulysses, pluck the lyre into bacchanal,

and stroke the nape of Penelope’s ivory neck.
And when I have sampled the lexicon of constellations,
of Orion chasing animals always beyond his reach
or weaving deep desire from locks of maidenhair,
I shall return to my well-worn life of hanging hats in the hall

and listen to my chest rise and fall, rise and fall.
From time to time I do this because I must,
because the double helix unwinds into permutations
irresistible, wanton, wild, and rare,
magnets that sing, pull, and draw me into wanderlust.

~William Hammett

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Friday, June 28, 2024

The Price of Admission

It is a brittle thing, like an old twig
or a dried leaf pressed under museum glass.
The qualification for quintessence,

the seer’s gaze into the heart of heart,
is a sapling that must know the hurricane
and feel the bruise of wind gods it cannot see.

The cost of slipping through the tent flap of eternity
is first love—the one untimely ripped—
that is lost to too few years round the sun.

Slings and arrows, stings to the marrow—
that is the price of admission to life
for the soul that is hiding for a time

inside fleeting flesh made from a random rib.
Such is the tilling of springtime soil
and loss in a paradise too early born.

But open the joy-stained gate
and let new rivers rage and roar.
Set free the monk and grant love to the whore.

Throw with abandon a flock of birds
into the air with orisons and holy charms,
for these troubadours stayed in the nest of yearning,

endured gravity in the time of youthful learning.
Glory circles round to find itself again
as Wordsworth discovers splendor in the grass

and takes up immortality with his pen.
This is how we step onto mandala spin
to find membership in the tribe of women and of men.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, June 19, 2024

The Bowery at Dawn

Whitman and Thoreau are usually out the door by six,
the first to leave their off-track cubbyholes—
leaves of grass piled to the ceiling’s naked light—

to observe seagulls spindrifting on high Manhattan air,
to watch the Brooklyn ferry lumber through decades
coiled like movie reels in their transcendental eyes.

Emerson, stumbling through the lobby, claims the East River
is full of transmigrations, currents of the Oversoul’s rise.
Kerouac awakens late, dons a wife beater,

is on the road less traveled half past the hand-rolled joint.
Hamlet is the only holdout, sitting in his nutshell
and calling himself a king of melancholy space.

Let us not be too harsh to judge the rags and weeds
shuffling down the pavement, harvesting dandelions
to accent their six-by-ten palaces of crack and speed.

We all live in the rundown El Centro Hotel, condemned,
a dust mote spindrifting through the solar system.
We are hungry hobos stirring in the Bowery dawn,

hoping to catch a wave of luminescent biocentric soul,
a ribbon of stars to carry us past the nine-to-five syringe
and find our home, wherever that may be.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Poaching Secrets from the Alchemist

Standing behind a cape of invisibility
woven from the orb weaver’s dew,
I study the wise and aging wizard,
his beard a cascade of white years,
unwinding gold from the lead on his bench.

His world is upside down or right-side up,
spinning like a drunken gyroscope
or a falcon creating wanton wind
with the purpose of fire and gyre.
Rain falls up to be transformed

into Solomon’s wildflower regalia
that will enter jaded Jerusalem
on the back of a borrowed ass.
This progenitor did not turn rocks into bread
or jump from a cliff onto angels’ wings,

did not transmute the kingdoms of the world
into a gospel made of shiny things.
His retrograde mojo was better at rolling stones
or making rattle and rebel clatter
from Ezekiel’s dry and lifeless bones.

As for me, I wish only to drink spiced wine
that bestows the power of impish Puck,
seduce the sultry brunette behind the castle wall
and gain a kiss on the far side of midnight.
Oh, what pleasant Saturnalia.

Let the periodic table mix and match
as you play me backwards, backwards play me.
Such creative alchemies will never give me pause,
for inversions still lie at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
Effect has become the everlasting cause.

~William Hammett

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Monday, May 27, 2024

Breach

The humpback spins, torques, sprays,
breaches the wave-capped skin of ocean,
the skein of rolling foam and blue.

The sky and sea explode unbounded
from the newfound sexual seam that is horizon,
undreamt of in his deepwater philosophy

of pods piloting in hazy cataract.
He is suspended in beatific view,
fixed and freed in transcendental fugue.

I wake within a dream, impressionism’s blur,
to discover the crystal lucidity of sight,
consciousness squared and multiplied by joy.

Suspended above the bustle of a crowded street,
I feel the vibrations of a thousand strings
plucked into harmonies beyond the scales

fallen from my eyes and unknown clefs.
Everything is rhythm ejaculating symphony
as rich and rhyming as any spiral arm

speckled with star stuff in a pinwheel galaxy.
In rare moments, I rise from my skin
to see that this wonderworld is mere illusion.

I am only mind inside a greater mind
observing the frequency of beget, believe, become.
A transparent eyelid blinks to behold

the marvel of behold, I and thou,
before I sink back into the ocean of Adam’s dream
and sing another meandering, migratory song.

~William Hammett

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Monday, May 20, 2024

Bird, Branch, Sky

The bird sits on the black branch
growing into the pearl-gray sky.
Or does the winter sky sit upon the bird,

the branch upon the sky?
This mystical geometry simply appeared
from nature’s morning mind.

The branch splits into finer versions of itself,
fractals that open a door to infinite quest
while the bird spreads its Rorschach wings,

balancing the magnetism of east and west.
But the sky knows only the thoughts of God
and is perhaps the father of this evolving trinity.

The bird suddenly bolts, takes wing
from its temporary still-life perch
as the branch recoils, contemplates, quivers,

clouds now twisting into the strangest of rivers.
What response can be made to these particles-turned-wave?
What can be made of bird, branch, and sky?

The beggar, king, prophet, and seer
can only weep for joy in December’s nave,
can only launch through parted lips a most ecstatic cry.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, May 9, 2024

Serendipity

With a gust of wind, the bouquet of flowers
flies from the rear basket of the bicycle.

Minutes later, the man scoops it up
and continues on his way to the park,

where he sits next to a young woman on a bench.
A maple leaf falls from the overhead tree.

They turn, grab, kiss, and laugh
without thought of repercussions down the line.

Years later, they live in a three-story Victorian,
a gaggle of daughters rushing out the door

to ride bicycles in the park and collect spring flowers.
Surely it was all divinely-inspired happenstance,

this blur of joy and color spanning decades,
for there is no such thing as randomness or chance.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Lost Moon

It was the Year of the Dragon,
and the moon was in Gemini
when I rowed towards the silver eye

resting on the rim of dark ocean,
water dripping from the oars
in the slow cadence of a dirge.

I was out of my depth in so many ways,
fall coming on hard and cold,
youth already spent on the known and old,

on fighting Grendel’s Mother
and her bitch-heavy pathological urge.
But then there was Mozart,

A Little Night Music, spin and jitterbug
to infuse this fallen man
with a few more stuttering steps,

a few more bittersweet miles.
Was it a kiss or the mind of God
or something else entirely

that I tried to reach on that long-ago night,
an ampersand that connected cradle to grave,
the modulation of a Tibetan Buddha’s wave?

It’s all the same, you know—
the kiss, the chant, the god, the now,
and yet I loved her song and flow.

I found a shiny nickel
minted in the Year of the Dragon
on a corner paving stone.

I polish it once a year with love
before holding it at arm’s length
against the glory of the stars.

And that is enough catharsis to bury the loss.
The moon is always in my pocket,
no longer a mariner’s albatross.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, April 18, 2024

Twisted Symmetry

Tie the gentle curve into a Gordian Knot
or fold the desert highway into pretzel logic.
Waves will still break on the shore in fringe and foam.

Let M.C. Escher walk up the down staircase,
take the Bureau of Weights and Measures off speed dial.
Rain will still slant silver in the spring.

Siphon the universe into a black hole
and hammer a triangle into Picasso.
The sun will still paint the meadow gold.

Unzip the double helix of DNA into drooping flowers,
make love to the twenty-something,
and dine out with the old crone.

The actress will still deliver her soliloquy
on the proscenium either way.
Explode the order of fractals into a jigsaw puzzle

or build a shrine to Our Lady of the Hobos.
Particle and wave will still keep dancing
no matter how you diagram the sentence.

Expose the man behind the curtain or not:
only in the undoing will the doing find potential.
Order becomes decay, decay is order’s art

in a cosmos that is cooling but always running hot.
Carry the wisdom of the ages, but be forever young at heart.
You will always be free to fold everything

back into a reality you cannot understand
as long as thought travels faster than the speed of light.
Tell me I’m wrong, and then tell me I’m right.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Piano Bar

It sits on the corner of Steinway and Baldwin Streets,
nicely cooled against Dog Day heat.
At 2 a.m., the bartender, in stiff white shirt and black bow tie,

polishes glasses and eyes them like an astronomer
looking through telescopes fixed on three silent patrons
at corner tables light years from one another,

their candles winking like inebriated stars.
The femme fatale at the ivories sounds like Nora,
her voice floating on late-night silk

and singing just as comely sweet.
I sit in a corner and scratch poems on a napkin
while observing this dim universe as the hours wear on.

The astronomer delivers a tumbler of scotch, neat.
Piano notes become cosmic background radiation,
a rendition in a minor key from the music of the spheres.

It is a universe that I can inhabit and wear like skin,
one in which I can create my verse on the downlow
for the next fourteen billion years or so.

~William Hammett

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Friday, March 29, 2024

War and Peace

There is much ado about guns
and cannons and then nothing.
There are troops and last-minute marriages
and lingering farewells at a train station,

fingertips touching vanishing fingertips
as the passenger car slides away
to a wave of tears and uneasy applause.
And then there is a great sigh of relief,

the return to the hometown or the farm,
afternoon naps on a sagging porch,
eyes sequestered by a floppy hat
to keep away gnats and dreams of shell shock.

And in between lies the truth, lies everything.
Everything—the day’s stock-in-trade—keeps it all going.
It’s how war begets peace, how peace gives birth to war.
Swords become plowshares, plowshares become swords.

To everything there is a season.
The old man polishes the long barrel of a carbine.
The young man enters No Man’s Land
in a war, they said, that would end all wars.

~William Hammett

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