The clouds here are beautiful in the manner of my wife’s hands. They are pleasures with strange limits, and change color quickly. In this way, they are like most beautiful things. Take songs.
In the car, when my wife turns the volume knob it’s to make the sadness louder. During the commercials or the jockey chatter after, I worry I’m depressed. But just because I might be depressed doesn’t mean I’m serious.
To be serious is to have something unwavering inside you. And, oh, how I waver. I’d write anything so long as it was beautiful. It’s beautiful to touch either of my wife’s hands.
My wife’s hands are warm as flagstones set out beneath the sun. When I touch them the ringing in my ears becomes the tuning of viola strings. I think it was something like this that made Andre Breton write “Free Union.”
But his enumerations get tedious. I’ll limit mine to my wife’s hands, then. My wife’s hands invented the word abode. When she folds them, my wife’s hands are tighter than the onion where all time goes.
One day it snowed and my wife put her hands inside the snow. They came out flush as the blood in the heart of a swan. When she put them to my face I could not feel my tongue.
I love conversations about art, however loose, however contingent or shaggy. I have been trying to let the pleasures of those conversations bleed into my writing. Thinking about a Breton poem or an REM song caught on the radio—these things are inextricable from my understanding of how I love my wife; bringing them into the foreground of this poem only expands the means I have to articulate that love.
"Having difficulty interpreting Williams’ ornamental cursive writing, Ruan struggled in her transcription. She searched for the published poem online, but was surprised to discover one didn’t exist. Confused, Ruan consulted the curator of the collection as well as an expert on Williams, who both verified her find was an unpublished original piece."
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"One verse in particular left me unsatisfied with my translation: 'pasan bajo el calor de mi ventana' became 'pass beneath my sweltry window.' 'Sweltry' is a weighty word, and I imagine the nuns suffering under their frocks in the Caribbean heat, but 'calor' remits to human warmth, even tenderness, those things—like the smell of used books and towels and the entangled scent of incense—that are of the flesh."
