The Poetry of William Hammett

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

The Rising of the Blood

There is nothing more important
to the rising of the blood
than the way a woman
moistens her lips lightly
with a tongue that is there and gone,
or the way
she turns her head slightly,
smiles with only a crescent inclination,
raises a long eyebrow,
or blinks as she turns the corner,
inviting you to follow
a slender sash of femininity
swaying in the wind
and her come hither now,
come hither.

~William Hammett

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Monday, June 30, 2025

Home from the War

In the summer of 1946, the young man stepped
from ship to train to bus and sat on broken springs
and worn leather as a silver motor coach
lumbered through the Midwest spewing black exhaust
into the already-hazy morning.

He looked out the window, saw children playing tag,

soldiers wading in waves while trying to take Omaha Beach.

The bus backfired, and he heard gunshots,

heard cloudless thunder from gray battleships

riding the offshore swell.

He heard the whining of the bus engine,

rapid artillery fire spitting over razor wire.

After long hours, a yellow straw suitcase

hanging from his fingers, he climbed three wooden steps

and stood on the gray porch in front of a screen door.

“Mama, I’m home. I’m home.”

After a night’s rest and a pitcher of lemonade,

his routine was the same from morning to dusk.

He stood in the fields, a scarecrow looking for German troops

riding jeeps into San Michel.

The black crows overhead failed to realize that it was war,

or maybe they did.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Bukowski

Well, I mean you know at the start it seemed
mostly living with whores in rundown apartments,
maybe in New Orleans and maybe elsewhere,
chopping garlic cloves and riding the bus,
confessional to a fault, words splayed on a page,
mostly alphabetical scattershot thrown at the wall
to see what sticks, but maybe you were howling like Alan
or riding a Coney Island mind, a Ferlinghetti whirligig,
a metronome ticking to the beat of a Beat
over and over again while drinking gin.

You could just as soon have written

about Vaseline hair or Thousand Island dressing

or some female French Quarter anatomy

wrapped in a kimono, and maybe you were

as free and loose as Mary Oliver,

only with a little heron acid trip thrown in

for some seasoning, word jambalaya on the bayou,

and in the end I guess it was kind of hip,

kind of cool with a standup bass

and poetry slams in a coffeehouse kind of way.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, June 17, 2025

The Chess Players

Old men in checkered shirts
and khaki trousers with winding creases
sit on stone benches in the park.|
Arthritic fingers—the instruments

of mortal gods fighting anachronism—

swap knights, bishops, and pawns.

The October day is chilly and gray,

an opening move to clouded sunset

wider than eighty-year-old yawns.

Up and down the line of speculation

there are mates and checkmates,

coughing laughter beneath cataracts

among old friends and warriors

talking about queens, their wives

who fell to the board because of age

that even a Russian gambit couldn’t save.

It is hard to distinguish thumbs

from the knuckles and knots of bare trees

grabbing for the curtain of evening

that will sweep away kings and royal pleas.

Soon the day will fade to black,

and the sky, or time itself,

unwinding all of the game clocks,

will checkmate empty pants and shirts.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Shadow and Light

In the study, quiet with dust,
the lamp’s small sun spills gold
over the tired oak desk.
Outside, trees begin to undress,

each leaf a farewell

dissolving like breath.

The large globe sits

in mahogany crosshairs,

oceans smudged with blue,

continents yellowed by years.
I turn it gently, a god exhibiting latitude.

We are always traveling, even here.

The faded rug recites its history
in threads of rust, plum, and smoke.
The season shifts—a whisper of wind,

a scattering of seminal seed

for a time that is only prophecy in October.

Books stand quiet like lines of school children
unable to move through afternoon’s honey.
Even shadows seem contemplative,

long fingers reaching for something lost.

A sparrow pecks the pane and vanishes,

a reminder that morning has passed,

that light and dark are trading places.

At peace, I close the book I wasn’t reading,
letting the moment rest in my hands.

Evening sweeps through the room
as the world turns, unhurried and unseen.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, June 5, 2025

The Weak Winter Sun

The weak winter sun
kisses glassy snow,
but not with passion
that would make lips part
or flesh melt into lascivious love.

It slides without a sound

into the pincushion metropolis,

a single coat of yellow

splashed on the sides

of city scrimshaw, spires

of metal, stone and glass,

on streets bathed in epiphany

for the blink of a circadian eye.

Pedestrians lumber

in and out of hope,

in and out of color splayed narrow,

arms and legs plodding through honey,

the air thick and cold,

mosquitoes eventually caught in amber.

It is a tease, a prostitute

slipping along gray pavement

with the promise of joy

at an hourly rate

until spring reforms the miniskirt,

until the long thaw of love

turns green under a godly sun.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, May 29, 2025

The Rose Between the Pages

The rose is dark red, almost maroon,
and flat after sleeping between pages
of a volume for most of a century.
Its blossom died before I was born,

two green leaves beneath their mistress’ cup

like angels holding up an idea

that still lives in musty, printed death.

There is a hint of perfume left,

unless it is nothing more

than molecules of imagination

that see a green stem and thorns

and the black clod of earth

from which they were born.

There is a love story here, to be sure.

The flower was tendered and received,

perhaps held close to a bosom breathing

with the hope of life after marriage vows.

The love affair lives on

between pages two-hundred-and-eighty

and two-hundred-and-eighty-one.

I can only wonder how many pages

were left to be read,

how many deeds were done.

Hopefully, it was a long story

filled with days and years

and all of the necessary things

that needed to be said

on rainy days, under the moon,

in the marriage bed,

or while walking down a country road,

where because of its winding path and view,

it was known that magical roses grew.

~William Hammett

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Saturday, May 24, 2025

King of Infinite Space

I am the creator and the created,
that which mates and is mated.
The circle is eternal and perfect.
There is no conductor on the New Haven line
to announce your destination.
There is no terminal point.
There is no station.

I am the maker of circles.

I am the maker of time.

I am the New Haven conductor,

and my pocket watch always rhymes.

Time is a fisherman’s line

that catches the cleaning woman

in a Lower East Side house of cards,

that catches her son who’s dealing in the park

when he’s not traveling a line of cocaine

that has no terminal point, no station.

I am the fisher of pleasure and pain.

The circle is a line.

The black boy rolls the metal rim

down the hill with a stick.

Form and function are the same.

I am the boy and the rim and the stick.

I am the arrow of time.

Hamlet said he could live in a nutshell

and call himself king of infinite space.

An off-Broadway play opened in Elsinore town.

I was the understudy who slipped in for Hamlet,

melancholy king of infinite place

but otherwise detained by a gravedigging clown.

A psych inventory said I was paranoid.

I love everybody but to hell with the rest.

I have amyloid folded in my brain,

or so says the CAT scan, the Eye of Horus.

My pocket watch always rhymes.

He who is not against us is for us

when traveling the New Haven line.

I’m the psychologist who made the test.

~William Hammett

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Monday, May 19, 2025

Geometry's Paradox

What if we are
all standing
at a slant
like a line
of skinny pines
caught in the violent
breath of a hurricane,

the very horizon

cutting our eyes

at an angle,

stitching itself

into the pupil,

the entire world

askew and play it

on the fly?

One must wait

for the foaming

rabid dog of surf

to subside.

Then we may

stand upright,

the plumb restored

to the vertical,

and walk along

the shoreline,

our feet flirting

with kinder surf,

foreplay for making

love to the most

mysterious deep

which seduces us into

its feminine heart,

neither scalene nor

isosceles but

circumscribed by fluid

love.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Our Story Thus Far

Our story thus far:
we are lumbering through the void
trailing star stuff, dust, and gas.

Behind us is the dead-weight pain

of climbing out of the surly sea,

the long wait for solar system swirl,

gravity’s push on amniotic matter

and the one-cell boogie up the chain,

prehensile pirouette in arboreal trees

to turning the tables at a Manhattan diner.

It was all preface for a cosmic certificate to ride,

eighty billion years of the double helix grind.

Galaxies now collide and combine

before flying off into the lamasery’s mind.

The future is om, no what and no where,

the omega of the cosmic brain,

the invisible point of singularity light

before the Big Bounce starts it all over again.

Let it rain, let it rain.
There’s frost obscuring the windowpane.

This is all I can see from my cabin in the woods.

~William Hammett

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