The Poetry of William Hammett

Thursday, October 28, 2021

You just gotta say “What a guy.”
Pinkerton and vet, living life as hard
as the concrete beat he pounded
when he was closing a case,
pulling the brim of his Fedora down
and disappearing into his overcoat
when he passed the man he knew
had cracked the hotel safe
and made off with the broad
with white legs that went on forever.

You told a guy, “She’s a keeper and you’re a fool.”
“I know, Dash,” he said.
“She bought me a beer and beat me at pool.”

You never gave up your sources,
never ratted names to the feds,
not even Tail Gunner Joe,
that baldheaded bastard who hated
lefty activists like you and the rest.
Jailed, blacklisted, checkmated,
but not down for the count.

They say that Papa picked up his style
from your clipped noir narratives,
even your words playing it close to the vest.
Smooth as the Continental Op
and as hard-boiled as the Fat Man
searching for the black bird,
you hammered out dialogue
on a black Remington Royal,
coughing and smoking
and throwing back cheap whiskey
while foghorns sounded in the Bay.

The clack of the keys sounded like gunshots
at the Chinese laundromat across the street.
Chandler was in the shadows
looking over your shoulder, unnoticed
because the rumble of a cable car
or the wailing siren fed your next sentence,
the one where the detective
clocks the police sergeant in the jaw
and walks away to the Grand Hotel
to meet the femme fatale.

You and Lillian had staying power.
For thirty years you lived with her
at Hardscrabble Farm while she typed
her own oeuvre on an old machine
with you in the background.
Hardscrabble—life imitating art.
The booze was never far away,
but you were a political southpaw,
never folding your hand
even when the DA made you go all in.
“A man should keep his word,” you told her.
And you did, in front of Congress,
but most of all on the printed page,
where truth and mystery
were strange bedfellows.

You were a thin man,
lungs black and always wheezing
through the day or Hollywood
when you potboiled your way
through screenwriting and radio dramas
that still retained a hard edge
that was the chisel of a man’s jaw
or the heft of a .44 caliber
that created widows and contested wills.

And when dying,
testy or resigned depending on the weather,
you followed your iron code
even though your heart was dying by degrees.
All those years ago,
you slipped into the biggest shadow of all,
no one tailing you up the hill
after you turned in your badge and gun
for the last time.
It was quiet—
the way you would have wanted it—
and then they laid your bones
in Arlington, loyal and with the peace of mind
that you’d never dropped the dime.
What a guy.

I was just a kid,
but I read your stories until the pages
turned yellow, seasoned and full
of my parents’ secondhand smoke
before I pecked out stories in a black Royal.
I’m just sorry that we never met
and shook hands, exchanging a folded paper
in a secret gumshoe handshake.
Or maybe we did.

~William Hammett

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Monday, October 25, 2021

Front Matter

There is the author’s name
followed by a date soon forgotten,
then city and font,
ISBN and publisher,
all rights reserved, of course,
the author’s cerebellum copyrighted
for the curious, I suppose.

And oh, by the way,
any resemblance to people living or dead
is purely, so surely, coincidental,
is it not, saith the law?

And yet the adulteries
and murders and voyages
to distant lands or inside the heart
have all spun through the tornado
of reality, have they not,
variations on a theme at best.

The smiles and whistles
and rants and loves
are as real as sun on glass,
as foam on wave.

Why else put pen to paper
or press slugs on ink
but for the fact that there are realities
to save and savor,
to dream about?

What if that is my own life
in those dogeared pages?
What if I myself inject the poison
into the wealthy owner
of the country estate in Wessex
or save the planet from the comet
or the Galactic Emperor Ximodius?

I need the distant stars
to keep hope alive,
but landlords and publishers
need coin of the realm.

The alarm clock rings,
so I get out of bed
and inject caffeine
so that I may save
part of the big blue marble
that’s smaller than a postage stamp.

My employer has my front matter:
my name, height,
date and place of birth,
prior employment,
highest level of education,
all soon forgotten
when the wheels of the day
start meshing like cogs
to turn the world one more time
on an axis that’s tilted
from leaning my shoulder
into the task at hand.

But here’s the secret:
I can quit at any time.
There’s always another book,
another day, another job,
another Sisyphus
to roll the stone up the hill.

I am free to leave
the classroom or factory
or corner office
to go outside and play,
to drink in sunshine.
I made a contract
with Newtonian physics
and the laws of gravity and man
when I slid down the birth canal.
But I still own the copyright.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, October 21, 2021

All the Songs I Never Played

I often think of all the songs I never played,
bronze-wound Martin strings silent
in the velvet-lined hard-shell case.
They exist somewhere in the quantum field,

the wave-particle duality
in the synapses of my brain that winks
every second or two between potential
and the notes I hung in a spare moment

on the tree outside my window
or the ears of someone washing dishes
in the next room or on the sunbeam
that was my companion eight days a week,

Walter Mitty playing the venue
twenty thousand strong as the lights went down
and the spot picked me up as I walked
center stage, slinging the strap across my shoulder.

There are days when I wish
I were an old black man,
sitting on a sinking porch.
There would be no regret, no looking back

as I hung notes on invisible clefs,
singing the blues and the sky
and never looking back,
working the strings with bony fingers,

tapping the boards beneath my feet,
making music sultry and sweet
or more often than not
down and out because Mabel done left me,

and that was the end of that.
The neighborhood wives and single mothers
would be my audience as they sauntered by,
brown bags and babies clutched under their arms

as they picked up twelve bars
before reaching the end of the block.
It would be a good life,
and maybe Clapton, Mick, or Keith

would discover my licks and angst.
At least the music would be out there,
drifting on a deep blue afternoon
and making love to the dying day

that had been near and dear,
though we certainly had our spats.
Sparrows on the telephone wire
would take the songs across the block

or the river, and my fame would spread
like the fire of sunset.
Yes, I wish I’d let it fly.
But that’s not what happened.

The world was too much with me,
and I dragged myself out of bed
to teach grammar or a poem,
me—the living cliff notes

standing in front of a sleepy venue
watching the clock
and hoping that my droning
would be put in a velvet-lined coffin,

my lyrics stashed in the string pocket
where they could do no harm.
And yet there were times I found the sweet spot
and played for hours, glorious missing time,

day-tripping through the catalog of a band
or the folkies for whom I was journeyman,
strumming or fingerpicking,
the left hand not knowing what the right was doing,

and yet both dancing in syncopated sync.
But still I wish I had lost more hours
to that soul within that lives on melody.
I wish I had played a thousand more songs,

the movement I needed right there on my shoulder.
I wish I had played them for you.

~William Hammett

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Saturday, October 16, 2021

Along the Meridian Nerve

I saw two lovers kiss
while sitting by the lake
before returning their gaze
to the pewter-gray water.

A fish jumped
and geese took flight.
It was overcast,
but the sun kept moving

in its arc behind the gray pall.
A crow watched the scene as well
on the bare branch of a winter tree
as crows are wont to do.

The lovers looked at each other,
blue eyes connected by unseen wires
like those once imagined
by cavalier metaphysicians,

and then held hands,
leaning shoulder to shoulder
as lovers are wont to do.
They smiled as they turned back to the lake,

silent and content for the moment.
The kiss had traveled
along the meridian nerve
that connects all lovers,

producing a marriage
that is the best that can be hoped for
between the heart and the brain,
pole to pole, body and soul.

For the record, the crows,
having observed the union,
took flight, black on gray,
in search of others plighting their troth.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, October 12, 2021

April Mayhem

The wind whips white dresses
like sails on oceans of green grass,

and suddenly it is spring
as young ladies from the red wooden schoolhouse

dance and pass between the mountains,
between winter and fall,

and all the mayhem that sun can bring
adorns the falling curls of maidens set free.

Amen to spring that such latitude
can swing wide the door to debtors prison

and free the soul that for a spell
was etched in winter’s glass.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, October 7, 2021

Tall Pine Trees in a Hurricane

I could not tell whether the tall pine trees
were fighting against the hundred-mile-an-hour winds
or engaging in a frenzied, orgiastic dance.
Branches, like the multiple arms of Shiva,
flailed wildly as their bodies whipsawed back and forth
with each new gust, untamed zephyrs
unleashed by Byron or Shelly on a future world
they suspected would need more hedonism.

The five-story pine in the corner of the yard
spiraled like a whirling dervish, orderly by comparison,
but then abandoned its pious spinning
to join the riot of its brothers and sisters,
green needles pointing towards sky and ground,
long fingernails waiting to claw my windows or roof
when the next feeder band swept through.

Or perhaps I have it all wrong.
Maybe they were martyrs or ballerinas
or both caught up in a westerly,
swaying left and right with arms arched
above their heads and bending to the wind
in a life and death choreography of salvation.

“Take me or not,” may have been their chant,
the wild rush and rustling of their limbs
against each other as the spirits,
angelic or demonic, blew in from the Gulf.
“But we will not fight, only bend
to the will of the same Father who determines
when sparrows must eventually fall to the ground.”

Stepping back from the window,
I clicked off my flashlight and listened to their declarations.
I have seldom encountered such surrender
or been as flexible in mind, body, or spirit
as these hamadryads rooted in a deeper well
of theology and soil that had thrust them heavenwards
years before they had been put to the test.

The spinner in the corner fell hard, died,
its nymph escaping into the clouds, I suppose,
and perhaps to a blue heaven and white light
accessed by traveling upwards though the eye,
its life review showing a progression from sapling
to firewood after the chainsaws had bitten
into the rings and concentric layers of soul.

The storm tracked north,
and after the sun reclaimed its ascendancy
and the juice ran through the wires once again,
I looked out the window and thought of life and death,
of going to the grocery store to buy more water.
The remaining trees were quiet
and prayed vespers inaudibly,
which was, I now knew, their regular evening routine.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Listening to the Beatles

It’s the plaintive opening that really gets me,
the wailing harmonica that indeed says love me do,
hopeful but not altogether confident,
like things could go either way.
It might as well say please me—please.

I might be cooking red beans
or driving to the drug store to pick up statins,
but the voices come through the speakers
that I can no longer locate in new cars.
Somehow I get there faster.
Maybe it has something to do with the theory of relativity,
but I suspect the answer is far simpler:
I’m a twelve-bar junkie, a hopeless day tripper,
a dreamer without the tie dye,
and no matter where I’m going,
any road will take me there.

It’s hard to decide which year to focus on
in the ten-year marathon from leather boots
to a lonely hearts club and beyond,
a backbeat that came full circle
to hard core rock and roll,
rolling over Beethoven
while everything still managed
to come together in unexpected ways.

Oh darlin’, I wish we had lasted longer
so that we could have relived it all together.
Remember when I told you
about the harmonica break,
the one you had never noticed?
We could have read the anthology together,
and I could have played through the catalog
on the Martin you saw in Cleveland.
Blackbird could have finished taking flight.
Really, I should have known better.

I still listen,
and the remasters sharpen the ear.
The drums are heavier,
the backing vocals more harmonic,
the acoustic wires cleaner than before—
it’s called bending the strings—
and they did it so well.
It’s 1964, and I’m in love with it
all over again.
It helps me get through the day,
through just about anything.
You said you understood that too.

The old bag of bones,
Grendel dressed in drag,
now long gone and doing God-knows-what,
told me I was a nowhere man.
Isn’t it ironic that years later
I became a paperback writer?

~William Hammett

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Thursday, September 9, 2021

Yearning at the Time of Equinox

my hand traces
the lines of your heart

so many summers
before and after

O that love
could last like a river

sweet bird
will you sing tonight

spring arrives
with old fevers broken

in the shed is a plow
that knows love’s invitation

we come back to play
like the shadow of mountains

the rain is a harvest
and you are my rain

fall gently now
into this yellow season

fall
but be forever unbroken

~William Hammett

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Friday, September 3, 2021

All Afternoon I Have Been Looking

All afternoon I have been looking
for a poem that would hold
the coming stars of evening.

Now,
at twilight,
I sense the presence of dreams,
constellations of love
just beginning to rise.

Around the corner
in the next room,
I realize
that you are sleeping,

and already
I wish to kiss
the possibility of full moons
on your horizon.

~William Hammett

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Friday, August 27, 2021

Gemini Rising

If your planet should wander
after long years into some alignment
with the moon as it floats,
lonely as ivory-colored bone,
through a naked winter tree,
a moon that combs your hair with dreams
and whispers that all destinies
are reduced to the single equation “be,”

if you should find the music of the spheres
dancing on some heartstring
in the key of presumed impossibility,
and yet the melody circadian and natural
as slipping into water
or reading the Braille of a lover’s face
before some god commands his light to “be,”

if you should find seven suns
with gravity bold enough
to slide old constellations made new
onto the palette of your life,
those years lost at intersections
where blinking lights said,
“too late, too soon—you can never be,”

would you, in an odd moment
unforeseen by the astrologer
running daily in your veins,
kiss Gemini rising
as the dawn kisses the sea?
Would you fill every cup of desire
with the hope of being captured
in an orbit that circles nothing
but the heart’s eternal “be”?

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Some Things Are Never the Same

Some things are never the same
after we have let our senses
wrap themselves around the ways of this world
with the best of intentions:

a first kiss, a glimpse of Monet’s brushstrokes,
chardonnay on the palate,
a line of Wordsworth uttered
by the tall trees surrounding a lake.

Memories are dusty books
on shelves just out of reach.
We climb the library ladder,
hoping that this time it will be different,

that the sight of the peasant woman
singing vespers in the field
will be as the first time the eye
fell in love with the golden wheat

in which she toils.
Still, I come back to you,
to your rhythms and gait,
the way you arrange place settings

on the table that we share.
You are the exception,
making the world anew
as you rise each day like a resurrection.

(written in 1969)

~William Hammett

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Saturday, August 21, 2021

Gazing at Sirius

Gazing at Sirius,
I reel at a ribbon of light
so precise, so like the laser
of a lover’s lucid eye,
that it can ride the pulse
of my alien vein
years after fusion fired its meter,
the seed of a lonely poem,
into the dark preface
of some cosmic anthology.

And now, this star’s symmetry,
its mystical binary beat,
has given midnight the pulse
of an earthly, circadian sea.
The salt and longing in my blood,
formed in a primordial ocean
that orbited a newborn sun,
has not been forgotten.
It thrums pentameter,
my heart’s pacing,
much like the Dog Star’s
cosmic iambic rhyme.

I am wise with spring,
reborn by star stuff
that now is iron and nickel and dirt
in a field plowed into fertility.
Distant lover and poet,
kindred spirit pouring light years
into the folded lobes of my brain,
I thank you for such aroma and spice.
In your clarity is redemption.
In your distant song never-ending
is the pearl, once hidden,
of great and glorious price.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Hope

Old woman with one eye cocked sideways to the past,
leather elbows working at the washtub, wringing sheets,
scrubbing dirt from a world nearing its expiration date,

the world that runs up the road to the rusty gate
that hems in your body and a part of your soul,
but maybe no farther,

you visited Chicago in 1942,
when you were young, wearing a yellow dress with red flowers,
and spent the night with a man now forgotten

because of your scrubbing and wringing.
Your husband is in the ground
and your son ran away with a woman from Cincinnati.

I do not have your courage
to separate fact from fiction with such rubbing
of soil from white sheets, of the now from what might have been.

I just let it rain.
For me, memories linger longer than they probably should,
but you do not ask why the sun and moon

trade places as they are wont to do.
You walk to the mailbox daily
looking for a letter from Cincinnati

while your husband makes flowers
from the rich loam of his grave,
a sliver of hope that you save.

~William Hammett

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Saturday, August 14, 2021

I Have Heard Tales

I have heard tales of a comet,
a feeding trough, and astrologers from Persia.
It is rumored they took a road trip,
opting for the scenic route to avoid the Gestapo.

There was a child, or so I was told,
who slid from a camel’s back
and gave his parents the slip
so he could audit a few courses in pre-law.

How strange. Afterwards, he disappeared
into the desert we all face—maybe it was a mirage—
where illusion and reality blur
into an impressionist painting of the human race.

This is the gossip making the rounds, mind you.
Next, his tongue, sharpened by stories
little more than flash fiction,
was muted when he took the stage

in a theater of the round,
his short soliloquies strangely absent.
The professors of pre-law were not amused
this time around. Stranger still.

The widow dressed in black
said that he climbed a tree and wouldn’t come down
until the sun took its curtain call
and the Richter scale caused the drapes to split.

He retired without the gold watch,
hung out the Gone Fishin’ sign,
and fed some sheep on a farm by the lake.
That was apparently the end—all she wrote,

as the saying goes. How strange.
At least, that’s how it was passed down to me,
though my neighbor says it’s a game of Kindergarten,
and the details are mostly degraded.

Still, a lot of people gather at the corner every week
to rehash the story and decide one way or another.
There’s no denying he’s a legend, larger than life,
though not so much in his hometown.

Rumor has it that he said as much himself.
So the story travels behind a comet’s tail
after all is said and done—
travels behind centuries grown younger

as the winter solstice freezes the sky every year.
Some say it’s just wishful thinking or a dream.
I don’t think so, though I must admit
it heals my heart every day before rising.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Meter and Rhyme

I have been told that my poems
don’t have meter and rhyme,
that all verse should have such pillars
to keep the words from falling over.
But I agree with literary billy goats: nay.

I mean, I know how to use them,
but I don’t do so unless my brain
is jumping over regularly-spaced hurdles
on a day when the world is too much with me
and I am constrained to toe the line

at the grocery or the bank
or use the menu options
when calling my internet provider.
I learned how to punish my words
back in the days of graduate school,

when I dissected poems and epics
and studied meter and form,
tetrameter and pentameter,
trochees and dactyls and terza rimas,
back when I used yellow pencils

and leaky ball point pens
and filled spiral notebooks—
three-hole, lined loose leaf
with cursive and cursed abbreviations—
each floppy collection, semester by semester,

becoming the latest manuscript
in a rambling, floppy bible
that was my academic oeuvre.
These days I store them in my cerebral cortex
where they can’t do much harm,

and besides, there’s no one
looking over my shoulder,
no one grading me off the curve
on whether my iambic line
stumbled and suffered a broken foot.

I write the words as they come,
letting them wander where they will
through meadows, back alleys, or
a train bound for Istanbul,
occasionally reprimanding one

or giving another a parole.
The meter these days is mostly intuitive,
there but not really there,
like the flakes in a Christmas snow globe.
I really don’t want to associate

with the old man from Nantucket.
I get published easily enough,
though admittedly The Barracuda Review
isn’t The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker.
But that’s okay because I’m the judge and jury.

because the waters of Lake Ponchartrain,
tell me that it’s time for another poem.
As for rhyme, well, that’s a different story.
I use it sparingly if at all.
It was good enough for Shakespeare,

though not always—he often opted out—
and also for Homer and Chaucer and Milton
and all those big wigs, authors of the greatest hits,
with whom I palaver in a tavern
in my more interesting lucid dreams.

After all is said and done,
not that it ever really is,
I usually don’t use rhyme,
don’t even bother my brain
with searching for those sound-a-likes
except from time to time.

~William Hammett

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Saturday, August 7, 2021

Main Street

The old man sits in a wooden chair
tilted back against the red bricks of the post office.
I think he may be a fossil,
one with the cement below and the bricks behind.

Or maybe he’s a Pinkerton for this museum
five blocks long and tailing into hardpan at either end.
Someone needs to keep an eye on memories
that blow like wind jangling the metal hasp against the flagpole

next to the grammar school that taught children,
how to be farmers and secretaries
who could name the first three presidents
and the planets when Pluto was still in vogue.

The fossil watches the Fourth of July parade,
ghosts of high school strutters in sequined bathing suits,
all stutter-stepping out of time to the boys,
their lungs not big enough bellows

to produce the holiday oompahs from the tubas
they wrestle with, round, brass bells
twisting and dipping because the band is overwhelmed
while batons soar into the sky end over end

in a failed attempt to escape small town life.
As for the students, who would want to leave
the dry goods store, the five and dime,
or the blinking traffic light, forever amber,

that beats the pulse of the town, pop. 426?
Tumbleweed rolls down the street on cue
from an invisible director shouting through a megaphone
to start the scenes or cut them down to size.

High above, a satellite looks over its shoulder
at the pulsar, forever amber, spinning from the collapse
of all life, the fusion of this Midwestern gem
having lost its fuel a few decades before midnight.

The old man rises from the chair and goes inside.
He is alive after all.
Or maybe he is one of many angels
who guard the blinking graves of Main Streets
strewn throughout the galaxies.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Assumptions

If we should see a dead man under a porch,
do we draw conclusions of murder?
Was there an evil spinster in the house with broken glass
and paint missing from the clapboards?

If the old man at the train depot
looks at us with his one good eye and snarls,
does it mean that he wishes to slit our throats
or sell our children for bread?

What if our spouses should grow flirtatious?
Does it mean they have black hearts
and live for the thrill of secrecy
at the restaurant across town?

I ask these questions, you see,
because the morning paper said the spinster’s house on Seventh
was built over a graveyard with exposed bones.
On page two was the grainy photo of a bum

whose lip was turned up as he squinted
to keep glare from his one good eye
while he lay on the bench as the Sunset Limited
carried parents and children to California for a vacation.

Page fifteen of a scandal sheet
showed a man and a woman kissing in a booth
after a fire destroyed their children
on the fifteenth floor above a fancy restaurant.

I have a story too, though an editor said it lacked credible sources.
The truth is best divined in the sky.
Only the moon knows the big picture
as it quietly rises, an omniscient, nonjudgmental eye.

The best we can do is pull ourselves out of bed
and resist rumors spread by the furnace's gossipy hiss.
We wake under the umbrella of fortune
that ignored a dead man, a hobo, and a tragic, fiery kiss.

~William Hammett

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Monday, August 2, 2021

Genesis

Quantum snow falls
out of the black hole of a night.
I stand before a streetlamp,
evening and morning, the first day.

The shadows of some other universe—
porches, a picket fence, a marble column—
will not flare into existence yet.
They are not in my thoughts at present.

I am a word speaking in Heisenberg’s void,
and nothing exists except in my mind:
“swirl.”
White galaxies spin around the lamp

and conform to the currents of my breath.
The night proceeds, the genesis
of lights now in living room windows,
and I see that it is good.

Gathering my fur collar against the cold,
I move through the possibility
of an amniotic street.
There is another lamp up ahead,

more snow falling out of the
multiverse night.
There are beginnings within beginnings,
the fractal nomenclature of creation.

Block by block,
everything hinges on the position
of the observer, snow, and a streetlamp.
In the beginning.

~William Hammett

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