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Tuesday 6 April 2010

William Carlos Williams: Porous


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http://www.oac.cdlib.org/affiliates/images/omca/omca_LNG36014.2_1_2.jpg





Cattail fluff
blows in
at the bank door,

and on wings

of chance
the money floats out,

lighter than a dream,

through the heavy walls
and vanishes.





http://www.oac.cdlib.org/affiliates/images/omca/omca_LNG34008.1_1_2.jpg





Porous: William Carlos Williams, 1938 (from Poems 1936-1939)

San Francisco Social Security Office: photo by Dorothea Lange, 1937 (Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California)
Thirteen Million Unemployed Fill the Cities (Unemployed men, San Francisco): photo by Dorothea Lange, 1937 (Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California)

4 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

Two beautiful (and little known) Williams poems here, next to Dorothea Lange's beautiful (and local) photos, truly "epiphenomenal." Thanks for such a great focus of attention. . . .

4.6

white line of jet trail in pale blue sky
above ridge, white half moon above trees
in foreground, waves sounding in channel

something each time present,
seemed to be finished

look at corner, the picture
plane, gesture toward

sunlit white clouds to the left of point,
tree-lined green of ridge across from it

TC said...

Thank you Steve. It's funny about the historical, and how the foaming of the epiphenomena is starting to look and feel so strangely familiar, as if all this had all happened before, perhaps in a dream...

something each time present,
seemed to be finished

(This, I think, as the person who has seen the ending yet forgotten it, said, is where I came in...)

Annie said...

only to reappear
in the deepest
pockets.

TC said...

Annie,

Yes, it's odd, that dematerializing and rematerializing, is it not -- almost like magic, almost like clockwork.

We must have seen this movie before.