Two poems by PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Visitation
—or it was night that entered, tar-hued
and moved inside me, a new blood; its star-
pocked hands gave the promise of bats. I waited
for their leather to spill into my window,
for their tiny throats to blow
and trill. A bell some distance away, bats
in its mouth, loved the taste and swayed.
I had wanted something of my own
to bind me. A man could live in the blur
of a hundred hearts, could be taught
to tame the eager clapper, which is Loneliness
testing the marrow and awaking what’s within:
scatter-song, blind and coming on like skin.
96 The Paris-American
—or it was night that entered, tar-hued
and moved inside me, a new blood; its star-
pocked hands gave the promise of bats. I waited
for their leather to spill into my window,
for their tiny throats to blow
and trill. A bell some distance away, bats
in its mouth, loved the taste and swayed.
I had wanted something of my own
to bind me. A man could live in the blur
of a hundred hearts, could be taught
to tame the eager clapper, which is Loneliness
testing the marrow and awaking what’s within:
scatter-song, blind and coming on like skin.
96 The Paris-American
Cascade
For all the fatherless children, the lake’s bottom.
For all the children butchered by abandonment
make them somnambulists in heatless nights.
Give a sleepwalking boy a lyre of smoke and a score
he can’t read. Rest, I tell my legs as they march
to the tune of a night terror toward the black
wet’s call. I’ll go in as flesh and come out
as water falling from the bowl of a pelican’s beak.
97 The Paris-American
For all the fatherless children, the lake’s bottom.
For all the children butchered by abandonment
make them somnambulists in heatless nights.
Give a sleepwalking boy a lyre of smoke and a score
he can’t read. Rest, I tell my legs as they march
to the tune of a night terror toward the black
wet’s call. I’ll go in as flesh and come out
as water falling from the bowl of a pelican’s beak.
97 The Paris-American
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc. 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and has received work-study scholarships from Bread Loaf. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sou’wester, West Branch, Blackbird and others. Phillip is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is working on his MFA in Creative Writing. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.