The Poetry of William Hammett

Friday, November 22, 2024

Frozen Pond

I come across the smooth, glazed
pond frozen in gray November,
rimmed by dark woods,
tall pines and dense thicket.

I imagine Christmas skaters

gliding over the sheet,

hands behind their backs,

scarves waving behind their necks,

rosy cheeks and down jackets

protecting them from a chill

just this side of death.

They disappear.

I am alone.

It is necessary to make peace

with such a winterscape,

to breathe it deep into the lungs,

for there are many more

waiting in the woods.

It will not last forever,

but for now it is a day

that masquerade morning,

light muted to wool,

has brought to pass.

My eyes turn gray,

and I am simply another tree

at the edge of the pond,

rooted and silent as the air.

I will wait.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Friday, November 15, 2024

Scarecrow

A smile sewn across his face,
he embraces life in the fields,
a daily witness to the sun,
wind, warm summer rain,
to the moon and its phases
mystical and wise in the messages
it fans across the sky like a Tarot deck
that explains the what, the where, the why.

He does not regard his life as crucifixion,
but as fruitful freedom to watch
the birth of seeds and the inevitable
falling of life into fallow fields.

He is witness to it all.

His body will soon be hidden

by a green field of corn.

In the winter he will be deposed,

sleep in the barn while angels sing,

really just the keen wind

whipping through slats in the wall.

He dreams of a floppy hat,

a checkered shirt, faded jeans,

confident that he will rise again,

leave the wood-straw tomb

and once more revel in the field,

the corn,

the pastures,

and wildflowers

crazy with Solomon’s bloom.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Monday, November 11, 2024

The New York City Subway System

Commuters with black tobacco lung
descend and rise in curious resurrection
to cold gray canyons only to die again.

They live in subterranean trails

carved from the deadest of rock

for the sake of electric shimmers

from silver bullet wails.

Standing,

the logos from Bethlehem

swings from a loopy strap,

unaware that he has been reborn

into the lap of downstream time.

He wears a worn hat

and baggy brown suit.

Sheep, riding and rocking

through switchover blackouts,

careen through invisible salvation

while scrolling a phone

or reading The New York Times.

This is a land of beggars, lepers,

the crippled and the blind

who wish to vacate the grave.

Connected by dramatis personae,

they march as a single outcast

onto the deep turnstile platform

which is their stage of seven stages.

Together, they are an incarnation

wanting only the opportunity to save.

This, therefore, is the universe.

This, the arrow of space and time

caught in orbital ellipse.

This, the marriage of the lamb

taken in holy howling vows

for better or for worse,

on hold until the future age

springs open a billion years

from now.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Continuum

Hanging upon every word
is another and then
another after that
until there is a grand scheme
of is.
The past has dalliance
with the future
through the intercourse of now
in these hanging, looping
bits of slipstream time,
a curious scaffolding,
a rolling patchwork quilt
made for Einstein
and his bending and folding,
the continuum for our kind
that must, like a trapeze artist,
grab hold and swing
you and me
from one minute
to the next.
There is no beginning.
There is no end.
We are spliced
into cunning creation
for a limited Broadway run
when we step upon the stage
to recite a line or two of text.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Daisy Chain

Catholic children in my youth
hustled beneath stained glass windows,
trod on green and gracious clover
to make daisies into a crown
of thorns.

Later, hippies made flowers

into bracelets and beads

as they drank from the pagan horn

and rolled in the wet grass

from twilight to hedonistic

morn.

Let beauty be beauty.

Let glorious whites and yellows

burst forth like the suns

they were meant forever

to be.

Let ecstasy run down the pulse,

thrum the silk and satin skin,

drive the many-chambered heart.

Let ecstasy be the child

of ecstasy.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Monday, October 28, 2024

A Bowl of Fruit

I left a bowl of fruit
on the table in the kitchen
for you to eat and thus kindle desire
in your body and soul
because I thought we might lie together
on the bed beneath the full moon
streaming through the open window
so that whispers of wind
may confirm the sweetness of love
and move your long black hair
across the smooth white sheet.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Saints

They are statues of marble, alabaster, and stone,
shot full of arrows and bleeding
in the name of a name that has no name.

Let Jeanne d’Arc be toppled from her horse,
be given the needle and knocked into a Thorazine dream
before her horses trample an army of little ones
simply going through the terrible twos.

Their relics are skulls and bits of fingerbones,
tattered pieces of cloth that touched a thing
that has touched a thing wholly and completely
something but, in the end, nothing.

Let Augustine turn back upon himself
and take a lover or two or three
before he can condemn the centuries
to the agony of not or a flower
blossoming into nothing more than rot.

I do not believe in them except for you and me
and everyone else who has the audacity
to live and die, to be sold “as is,”
to be the I am, the perfection of imperfection
found in the roots of a tree, a pebble of bone
that walked before it limped and was consecrated
by simply, through decay, going home—
going home as is, going home.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Rolling Zen

The white teacup with blue veins
sits on its round, bone-white throne
of sorts.

The prostitute, weary from walking,

will decide to go home

in two years and an odd number

of days.

The days will surely be odd.

The Rolling Stones

have a new album called Om.

This, too, has not yet happened,

though the lost chord will have its say.

The yellow number two pencil

sits on the blank white loose-leaf pad.

The words will eventually come,

though the when is not an issue.

The midtown bus

carries the weight of saints

to Nirvana Street and the end of the line.

Some say there is a street called Straight

where people regain their sight.

Some say there is no end to the line.

The Rolling Stones don’t care

if the line has an end.

St. Paul cared too much

about everything.

He only wrote

on even-numbered days.

He was odd that way,

but very very straight.

Ducks ascend from the marsh

against a canvas of purple

turning into crimson and gold.

They’re not sure where they’re going,

but they've regained their sight,

and the ecstasy of flight is enough

to satisfy the urge.

It wouldn't be enough

to satisfy St. Paul.

God saw it all

and said that it was good,

but not your god or my god.

It’s the god at the end of the line,

if there is one.

Who can tell?

Perhaps the teacup or the pencil,

the ducks or the bus.

Om.

~William Hammett

Site Map

Monday, October 7, 2024

Wave-Particle Dulaity

I am the river and the sea,
the sand and the mountain,
the seed and the tree.

I navigate traffic in Manhattan
while fasting in the desert,
the stone canyon shadow,
the burning rocks and sun.

I am,
you are,
he, she, or it is.
I decline nothing
but the noun and verb
as one.

I am reading you
while you are reading me.
Together, we are the poem.

It is as simple
and as complicated as that,
this marriage of words,
this contradictory pact.

I choose the flowing state,
the wave, not the particle,
as my final fact.

~William Hammett

Site Map

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

Site Map

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

Site Map

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

Site Map