'Waiting for that music'

 

“Poemshave a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a differentkind of music of necessity.  That's, in a way, the hardest thingabout writing poetry; waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know ifit's going to come.” –C.K. Williams

Bornin New Jersey in November of 1936, poet, critic and translator Charles Kenneth“C.K.,” Williams won nearly every major poetry award including the 1987National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood, the 2000Pulitzer Prize for Repair, the 2003 National Book Awardfor The Singing, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetimeachievement, awarded shortly before his death in 2015.

Williamsonce noted, “When you begin to write poems because you love language,because you love poetry, the writing of poems becomes incredibly pleasurableand addictive.”   ForSaturday’s Poem, here is Williams’

SILENCE

The heron methodicallypacing like an old-time librarian down the stream through the patch of woods atthe end of the field, those great wings tucked in as neatly as clean sheets, isso intent on keeping her silence, extracting one leg, bending it like a paperclip, placing it back, then bending the other, the first again, that herconcentration radiates out into the listening world, and everything obedientlyhushes, the ragged grasses that rise from the water, the light-sliced vault ofsparkling aspens.

 

Then abruptly a flurry, aflapping, her lifting from the gravitied earth, her swoop out over the field,her banking and settling on a lightning-stricken oak, such a gangly, unwieldycontraption up there in the barkless branches, like a still Adam's-appledadolescent; then the cry, cranky, coarse, and wouldn't the waiting world laughaloud if it could with glee?