IMPROVISATIONS

William Carlos Williams

I

Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

II

For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds “up there by the cemetery”. “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the meadows for a couple of weeks”. Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out at toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and good shoes and my-thirty-year’s- master’s- daughter’s two cows for me to care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open fire: age’s lust loose!

III

Talk as you will, say: “No woman wants to bother with children in this country”;—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest door-knobs in Christendom. And I’ll answer you: “Gleaming door-knobs and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling, whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands in pocket leaning upon my lamp-post—why,—I bring curses to a hag’s lips and her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you; best to blush and out with it than back beaten after.