The Poetry of William Hammett

Saturday, March 19, 2022

Playing the Guitar

I caress the smooth neck over and over
and wrap my arm around the contours of the body,

the curves cradled as in a passionate scene from a movie.
My fingers sensuously dance up and down the wires—

press, hold, release, spread, reach.
My right hand strums or picks—

thumb, then index and middle fingers
doing a slow waltz or a spicy tarantella.

Occasionally my left moves to the twelfth fret
to chime the high steel into cathedral bells

on the far side of a distant mountain
or a single note from the music of the spheres,

the touch lighter than the beat of a butterfly’s wing.
Do not worry, m’lady.

I will explore the full range of your melodies,
though I must cajole and charm since you are mute

when you take to your soft, casket-like bed.
I finish with a downstroke—an arpeggio, a flourish—

and listen to the choir fade
or simply mute the strings with my left hand,

my right floating away with silent reverence.
The guitar has yielded all it had to give,

and so have I.
I turn out the light and then sleep,

dreaming of the music in a voice,
the curves of a body folded into mine.

Playing is very much like making love,
or so a distant memory tells me.

~William Hammett

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Monday, March 14, 2022

Paradise Lost

There was a time when I saw myself
washing over you
and you washing over me

like a stream polishing smooth stones
in a bed of silt
beneath a latticework of leaves,

and the rain only swelled
the process of our two rivers
flowing into a common sea

until an apple fell from a tree,
and the hiss of a fat snake

collapsed paradise into a black sleep
without any dreams.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Corner Bar

It is an island universe for astronomers
at the end of their sidereal shifts
and possibly the end of their wits
when they cannot comprehend
the beatitude of rising constellations

and the quiet, empty serenity
hanging between the stars.
They seek the comfort of coordinates,
the declination and right ascension
onto bar stools lining the mahogany altar.

The background noise of the universe
is “Stand by Your Man” or “Free Ride”
and emanates from the cluster
of neon beer signs, red giants and white dwarfs
and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.

These night watchmen drink what’s on tap
and wonder why their wives, at light speed,
gave them an unheavenly heave.
No stand by your man. No free ride.
Dark matter indeed.

After last call they will develop
glass photographic plates in their dreams
to better understand the mystery
of the coming dawn’s wide canvas
that is kissed by a leafy tree, a shock of hair,

brushes that dab the spectrum
oozing on the painter’s palette
and thereby create the future perfect tense
that is the rising of the cities
and savannahs of the world.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Perspective

Just the right amount is poured
into the long-stemmed glass
so that the cabernet sauvignon

can breathe, the bouquet preserved.
My mind is on the palate
after the first sip of black cherry,

the green pepper and vanilla spice.
The grape has fulfilled its promise
from vineyard vine to custodial cask.

After the second sip my eye wanders
to the Degas mounted on the wall,
and I decide that it represents clarity and truth

despite the dizzy white brushstrokes
that created the spinning ballet class.
It is after the third sip that the arteries dilate

and my heart begins to reliably relax
into a philosopher’s quest for whatever
philosophers seek to extrapolate

from postulates about chickens and eggs
and angels jitterbugging on a pin.
I decide to investigate.

In another painting, lovers kissing
in the foreground are almost an afterthought.
Telephone lines and streets

converge to a vanishing point,
a focal slide of perspective,
a vintage vortex and invitation

minus the cursive and vellum.
But my mind, try as it might,
cannot penetrate the infinitude

of this black hole hanging
on the far side of the oak-paneled room.
So I tilt my head back

and think of this one unalterable truth
that cannot be deduced from theorems
or dialectics or even the rattle

of a shaman’s beads around a midnight fire:
some kisses are indeed sweeter than wine.

~William Hammett

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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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