The Poetry of William Hammett

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Film at Eleven

The young lovers plan their life together
with an algorithm of the heart
running on calendar pages not yet printed.

The stodgy professor solves the Collatz conjecture,
looks at the chalk ciphers on his blackboard,
and wonders whether the elegance of his proof

will be understood by a world twisted into pretzel logic.
Our silver moonchild inches from the Earth
at the rate of one foot per year.

In a billion years, will it careen
through interstellar space, the big blue marble
having to weather the empty nest?

Will the flowers in my garden bloom
or remain unpublished because of the need
for further editorial comment by a rake?

Will carousels around the world die from entropy
or speed up and become blurry time machines,
hurling children into the twenty-fifth century?

Perhaps the young lovers will ride a carousel,
stare at the rebellious moon,
and solve all variables in the equation of love.

Perhaps the evening blossoms into a psychedelic flower,
unfolding in unpredictable ways.
There was a time when my third eye

could predict the coming of days,
but age is a cataract that folds my brain into haze.
I take three steps and get a little older before I sleep,

before I watch the prophetic newsreel of my dreams.
Its headlines will surely tell me how everything goes down
beyond the horizon and all temporal seams.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, April 14, 2022

Wide River

The river is wide enough
to carry creation to the sea—
forest, stone, poems written on fern,
obits and records of birth

and all that lies in between,
fury of the furnace and the jealousy of ice—
all are flowing in this liquid time
to a nonrepeating decimal place

lost in the infinity of pi.
Nothing is forgotten
in this rush to the genesis of resurrection.
I see my grandfather’s rocking chair.

It was his cradle and throne,
its spindles and curved runners
riding a blue quantum wave.
His spirit is surely swimming in the current,

half in and half out of the grave.
I climb the steps to his wooden porch
and sit in an antique chair,
wondering at what point in the afternoon

I will see myself gliding by,
smiling and none the worse for wear.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, April 7, 2022

The Luncheon on the Grass

I am fascinated, though perhaps I shouldn’t be,
with Edouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass,
known as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
if one smokes French cigarettes with gold satin filters.

A nude woman sits in the grassy shade,
and two young male dandies, a slight leer
on their bearded, aristocratic faces,
are dressed in black frock coats and frippery.

Another woman has pared down
to her birthday suit to skinny dip in the background.
Hmm. Let me emphasize that: hmm.
Did the foursome set off to have a picnic,

with the men casually remarking
once the wine and cheese were unpacked,
“Hey, you ladies should take off your clothes”?
Were the women suddenly overcome with the vapors,

too hot to keep their ample bosoms under wraps?
I sometimes wonder if, a few acres to the left,
Max Yasgur is watching Richie Havens
take the stage to sing “Handsome Johnny”

to a crowd of hippies half a million strong.
These are mere stragglers who didn’t heed the warning
not to take the brown acid.
Speaking of . . .

It seems plausible that bad mushrooms
are hiding behind the basket of food,
the men thinking they’re looking at pumpkins,
the women tripping on ergot cheese.

I just can’t find a narrative to go with such bucolic hijinks.
I have one theory roundly rebuffed:
The flying saucer left minutes earlier.
The men are dazed because of missing time,

and the plump ladies will give birth to alien babies.
Jackson Pollack will be hired years later
by the infamous Men in Black
to squirt away the large gray heads

with water guns filled with paint,
the portrait having been commissioned
by people wearing tin foil hats in Roswell.

~William Hammett

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