The Poetry of William Hammett

Thursday, February 24, 2022

So Much Depends upon a Windowsill

My apologies from the outset.
I have not managed to tame this poem,
these scattershot words masquerading as art.
It started as a brief description

of an Italian man who carves a doll
for his granddaughter, freckled and five,
from a pine log found in the Apennines.
I grew distracted with that rhyme—

pine and Apennine—
and my mind wandered like an untethered balloon.
Suddenly I was in St. Peter’s Square
listening to the Pope, who I think is the cat’s pajamas,

as he spoke from the balcony to a gaggle of nuns
and pilgrims who had come to find solace
in papal blessings and a carafe of chianti.
I was already in Italy,

so I went with the flow and kept writing.
My Spanish is ramshackle roughshod,
and my Italian never materialized
from the quantum field of linguistic potential,

so my free verse ended in a poetic cul-de-sac.
I entered a Vatican museum but stumbled
into Dan Brown, who positively insisted
that I hold up a mirror so he could decipher

a seventeenth century manuscript on pigeons,
naturally written backwards in Portuguese,
and thereby save his latest girlfriend
from being blown up by the Illuminati.

At this point, my legerdemain with words failed,
and I decided that this poem
should be about a cat sunning himself in a window.
He’s content to leave well enough alone.

I mean, William Carlos Williams wrote
that so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow and chickens,
so why not a cat, sans pajamas, who believes
that so much depends upon a warm windowsill?

~William Hammett

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Friday, February 18, 2022

Big Sky Country

The name is no mere hyperbole.
The sky is unbounded blue, impossibly vast,
extending from the horizon before me
to the razor thin line to the south.

All is quiet except for the occasional murmur
of wind combing grass and tugging on my sleeve.

Two arcs on either side connect them both
without a seam, hitch, or geometric vowel.

In the far distance. low mountain peaks
have the audacity to break the smoothness
of the world’s rim, but that is okay.

It is merely a bit of filigree work
carved by earth or sky—I do not know which.

And though the land is majestic in its monotony
as it flies off in all directions without permission,
painted in broad strokes by a brush

held by the hand of a lingering Lakota spirit,
every point of latitude and longitude
is the center of this loping cowboy universe.

Blue and brown grasses mix like a Monet,
gloriously uneven since the seasons are changing
and the last cold front has signaled surcease
by rolling like white carpet into Canada.

My feet make contact with the ground,
not that gravity weighs me down
since I am lightheaded as I stand surrounded
by so much of everything and nothing.

I do not recall how I got here,
though I suppose I must have walked
unless I was placed here as an advanced scout
by the Lakota hand that takes nothing for granted.

Or perhaps I was snagged by a diurnal dreamcatcher.

I love my Creole home—it’s music and food
and delightful jumble of vernacular pidgin.

But sometimes I need the absence
of streets and brick and telephone wires.

Mr. Taylor flies gingerly to Carolina,
but I occasionally I go to Wyoming in my mind.

~William Hammett

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Sunday, February 13, 2022

Rue Montclair

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

by John Keats

Let us assume for no apparent reason

that the name of the street is Rue Montclair,

an ordinary lane miles from the electric frenzy of Paris.

And let us further assume that it is a spring day—

any day in April will do.

It is two in the afternoon.

There is time to look forward with a modicum of anticipation

as well as look back with a minimum of regret.

And there is time to sweep and polish

the gloriously mundane that hangs invisibly

from rooftops of curved tiles and gray slate.

Such is our stage, for we are going to observe

the lazy, mosquito-like activity of this offshoot.

Call us peeping toms or sociologists

or painters looking for a suitable subject

to put on canvas—it makes no difference.

A slim man with thin hair pedals a bicycle

with petunias in a basket hung on handlebars.

He works for the flower shop on the left,

the one with the weathered red awning

above a window with the unremarkable name

of Fleur Montclair, but it is all that it needs to be.

He passes a rotund balding man

carrying a brown paper sack of baguettes

from the bakery called Patisserie Celine.

A triangle of sunlight has shifted

ever-so-slightly since we’ve been watching,

perhaps by a degree of arc, no more,

so that it tilts more sharply against the masonry

of the stationer’s shop that carries exotic inks,

vellum, parchment, heavy linen paper.

It is said that even in the digital age

the French are absorbed by matters of the heart.

A handsome man buys note paper and writes,

“Dearest Anna, I love you more than a field

of white daisies and lilting daffodils. Love, Charles.”

Two lovers, arms around each other’s waists,

step absentmindedly over cobblestones

to cross our small work-in-progress.

They kiss, moist lip against moist lip,

which is exactly what two o’clock demands.

There is, of course, the mandatory café,

where someone drinks a small cup of coffee

while another anticipates evening with a glass of wine.

They stare at a point beyond our ken,

absorbed in reveries of things to come or moments lost.

It is time to leave now,

and whether we have witnessed stereotypes

or a street that somehow got caught

in a web of bygone days,

it is nevertheless serene as the sun grows brighter in its falling,

Would you not agree that it is almost too much to bear

to behold beauty that would fit

in a shadow box hung on wall in need of paint?

~William Hammett

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Monday, February 7, 2022

In the Wake of the Whale

' 'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!
Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.

from Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Surely the world has been knocked off its axis,

tilting towards menacing, demonic Betelgeuse

rather than faithful, beatific Polaris,

shattering the righteousness of compass points.

Nature withers at the root, and the time is out of joint.

The sun and rain can no longer sign treaties

or find a fair and just armistice.

Saharan heat boils the Gulf of Mexico

while madmen who cannot add or subtract

clamber up marble steps to proclaim that the sky is falling,

to chant “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

The Black Death breathes heavy on the fool,

the snow leopard curling in its den

outside the icy gates of Tucson

while the San Andreas grinds its stone teeth

in anticipation of human sacrifice.

As for me, I choose to swim in the wake of the whale—

the humpback, right, blue, and gray—

as it travels ancient routes in blue-green grace

and sings love songs now lost in translation.

Let others ply the wake of rush hour traffic.

I choose the mariner’s phosphorescent seas,

flukes carving cursive script, a scripture

rich in liquid vowels and sacred nouns

that speak of Omega’s distant rise

and a return to the bare breast of innocence,

to the spirit hovering over the deep

before it recreates paradise.

~William Hammett

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Monday, January 31, 2022

Every Year

Every year I blow through the calendar date
on which my lungs will cease whispering
and my neurotransmitters will stop sending
the codes that fire imagination into reality

and keep my armature of bones from crumbling into chalk.
Amen and amen. Such blindness is a blessing.
I wish to put on a three-piece suit and dine out
without being chauffeured by a shadow.

In fact, I will kiss a beautiful woman in a crowd
even though her husband,
the size of a side of beef,
knocks the fillings from my molars

with a haymaker that leaves me
just this side of the grave, but smiling.
I will do this and more in blissful ignorance,
like writing notes to myself,

secured to the fridge by a GREATEST DAD magnet,
about what I should remember to do
in 2048, the Year of Our Lord.
I will finish reading The Canterbury Tales

while hiking three miles of the Appalachian Trail,
In the spirit of a true pilgrimage,
I will challenging fellow hikers to a contest
to see who can tell the most outlandish story.

Mine will be about kissing a stranger in a crowd
before needing considerable dental work.
And I will attend Keith Richards’ party
when he reaches a weathered one hundred and two

and consider hanging an IV drip of Jack Daniels.
In the distance is a mountain ten miles high,
its top a piece of granite jutting above the rim
of the forever-reeling earth, the father of tribes

and the bringer of mojo to the young at heart.
That’s my headstone, but it will take me years
to lay my body at its base and say, “Good night.”
I am a modern-day Ulysses, home from the war

but hungry for continued mischief and a BLT.
What would be the point of knowing
that an out-of-control Ferris wheel
might hurl my body into the stratosphere

on some Tuesday afternoon, May twelfth, at 6 p.m.?
I have written my epitaph. It says,
“Death took more than a few jabs at me,
but I was a moving target.”

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Footnotes in the Kingdom of God

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

“Flower in the Crannied Wall”

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Daylilies, lavender, and dianthus

push through sidewalk cracks

next to abandoned factories in dying towns,

reaching for the heaven above the heavens

against all odds on the craps table

that wreaks havoc with the ceaseless circadian.

Old men play chess in the park,

knowing they are checkmated

before they shuffle to the bench

like pawns moving one square or two

into an opening gambit of graves.

The commuter from New Rochelle

folds his paper and stares through the train window,

unable to recall whether he kissed his wife lately

because his memory meanders like a stream.

Rusted farm equipment from the forties

sits on foreclosed acres of bindweed and nettles.

Oh, but it was good when it was good,

with tube radios, freckled children, and fireside chats

fertilizing crops by some sleight of hand

known only to carnival barkers and God.

Lovers kiss as they stroll down the avenue,

oblivious to disapproving stares

while holy men knotted into a lotus quietly meditate

and sunlight slides across a lazy gecko

paying rent on a white Arizona rock.

And then there are the poor and lowly,

who have been diagrammed below the sentence,

yearning only for the syntax of warm beds.

All of these vignettes are short stories and poems,

no more than aspiring asterisks

fallen to the bottom of yellowed pages

in basement archives where silence

is given perpetual lease.

But all are redeemed from oblivion’s yoke,

ransomed from insult and lavender’s decay.

Raindrops quench the daylily’s thirst,

for the first shall be last

and the last shall be first.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, January 19, 2022

A Flower in the Desert

It is a rare flower that can handle hardpan,
that sinks roots into dry, cracked earth
that only dares to dream of silver lines of rain,
fat drops to melt away the grit from unrelenting sun.

It is a miracle that yellow and violet petals,
forgiving of the genocide of its kind,
can remain open to peace and possibility,
only folding their beauty when a cold moon

perches on a jagged peak of igneous shadow,
the pale face of an emperor ruling a wasteland.
But the politics of emptiness is fickle.
The indifferent white demeanor is quickly dethroned

by a smiling yellow dictator
who welcomes only cactus, scrub, sagebrush,
and, in a moment of clemency,
a fair and lonely maiden dressed for court.

I met such a fine lady in the desert of my youth,
when promise had been beaten down
by a wanton weed, dry wedlock
pursuing a scorched earth policy

for the sake of pursuing scorched earth,
blue draining from my eyes,
green fading from my heart.
From the corner of my eye

I spied a flower in the desert,
but I did not have faith that angels would catch me
lest I hurt my foot against a stone.
I stood on the the parapet of the temple,

hesitating for a split second
as I pondered angels and the epiphany of the flower,
then slipped, hurtling towards hardpan,
and awoke, bruised and alone.

Or so the story goes.
Decades later, in moments of fertile recollection
I see yellow and violet
from the corner of my eye.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, January 13, 2022

The Mountain Beyond the Meadow

There is a mountain beyond a field of wildflowers
beyond the rail fence beyond the garden
of daisies, larkspur, evening primrose,
and others that have claimed squatter’s rights.

I can see the three-peaked snow-capped mountain—
I imagine the ridges to be a high priest
flanked by two altar servers in white surplices—
from my kitchen as I open the Chateau L’Evangile merlot

and gaze at this layered study in perspective.
It is as if I were looking into a frame
hanging in a hushed room with wooden floors
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And yet the scene changes
with the moving sun and seasons,
like Monet’s Haystacks or The Houses of Parliament.
When summer heat smothers the helpless plain,

the peaks dance like ballerinas
held hostage by a heat shimmer.
In the winter, these servants of the sky
are an exercise in lapidary,

etched like cut gems glistening
against a background that is painfully blue.
Spring and fall are transitional phrases,
by turns cutting and stripping my garden stalks

or swaying the field grasses with clean zephyrs
or hazy incense offered to whatever god is served
by these dimensions whispering “Closeness, distance,
closeness, distance, but bow also to the intermediary

that keeps them righteously apart.”
I sip the merlot and look at the garden,
fence, meadow, matin-covered mountain,
and realize that the world, organic and mineral,

is circadian, evolving, rhyming with color and shadow.
“Lord, it is good to be here,” St. Peter said
as light and darkness and voices danced around him.
It is good to be in my kitchen, grounded

by pots and pans and a vintage from the valley below
even though the universe is still expanding,
stars flying in all directions like priests and ballerinas
and fireflies carrying seeds to distant worlds.

I am content to raise a toast to humility
and be an infinitesimal part of this kaleidoscopic show.

~William Hammett

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Friday, January 7, 2022

Gardening in the Upper Case

I planted a book of Poems
by Emily Dickinson in my loam —
and it wasn’t long before Vowels
and Consonants — brides and grooms
alphabetical — Behold! —

married and blossomed
into sentences — Verse
that was violet and yellow
and scanned like some Epic —
fit for a Garden — a kingdom

perhaps — though who knows
but the Sower of seeds —
of men and words and deeds
that bear thirty, sixty, a hundredfold—
before the bell of Evening tolls?

I suspect this harvest
contained Nouns in the Upper Case —
since Love has been known
to reveal itself — an Incarnation of sorts —
in bells, colors, and caps

swaying on stalks —
a Choir not forgettable
in the humblest clods of Earth
that seem to know chapter —
and yes — Verse— about Rebirth.

~William Hammett

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Monday, January 3, 2022

The Importance of Buttered Toast

I have never written a poem about a Buddhist monk
because the one I knew would not open the window of his soul.

He was in the business of unconcern and renunciation,
trying to get the hell out of Dodge for good

so that the the great mandala
would not hook his saffron-colored robe

and spin his karma through another lifetime.
He told me that we didn’t really exist,

which to me is like buttering toast
only to find that breakfast is a scam.

I put a period on a blank page and then erased it.
“Now you’re getting the hang of it,” he said.

I didn’t think it was much of a poem
even though he said it was my best work to date

before assuming the lotus position,
as if he were posing for a Moody Blues album cover.

That’s when I put the period back on the page,
a Zen act of pure whoop-dee-doo,

but I still maintain that it wasn’t a poem.
It was merely a bit of untethered punctuation

taught to me by a gaggle of Catholic nuns
who relished living every day in Dodge.

They were sometimes a mean bunch of black and whites,
but we agreed that buttered toast was buttered toast.

~William Hammett

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