Stephen Williams

All the Odes

The introduction says Neruda became a conduit for the people's suffering. I think Milwaukee Avenue is a conduit for the people's suffering. It runs diagonal and makes a star out of every intersection. It goes all the way to Kenosha. It even has an airport. I like its bright cheap colors, I like how it speaks many languages fluently, I think Milwaukee Avenue, its broad daylight, its blazing apparition, is a conduit for people's suffering.

For the faun molded in the wall of the Congress Theater is there for your sake.

For even spring, even summer speaks with a forked tongue.

Why did the tower fall on that day and no other?

Harrowing friend. Gray sky. Warm wind. Sidewalk. Raindrops? Old gum.

I stop at BP to get a Sugar Free Red Bull. Frank O'Hara never heard of Sugar Free Red Bull, he was innocent as Coca-Cola, not like BP which had just overthrown Mossaddegh as the great poet was entering his prime, and he died at 40 which I am now sucking my sour yellow drink walking.

One would like to add to O'Hara's protective weave of associations, which is never complete, and which isn't his except in an honorary sense, or anyone's, one would like to protect what needs protected.

One would like everything to have an ode to it. One would like to yearn not for the luminous but the cheerfully painted and available.

One would like to have without choosing.

But it was much more intuitive and intimate. And immediate. It was an experience, after all.

These thoughts almost mine.

But one got to go anywhere with it. One got to choose. Not choose between; but choose.

Did one choose?

One moved through.