RANDALL WILLIAMS
_________________________________________________________________________
I decided to sing to the dead fox
ann and antlers then (to open up the
twilight of the form)
Beautiful duchess, you are memorabilia and a pair of
crow eyes
Kailua (a light
suit of geometry)
coursing table full of
quietude
Saint Gabriel, I am running one very passionate mile
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Last
Thanksgiving, Randall Williams awoke in
He and I were at
his sister's house, and we'd brought two roosters along that we planned to have
slaughtered on Thanksgiving morning. We were shooting a film about the whole
experience -- the previous evening I'd shot him catching the roosters, putting
them in a cage, putting the cage in a car. We shot the drive to Shenandoah,
even stopped at a Golden Skillet chicken restaurant and shot its rotating
chrome corn cooker. And we were going to shoot the old man who was taking time
out of his Thanksgiving to show us how to kill and prepare a chicken. But the
chickens were gone. We suspect that the cop downstairs took them for
cock-fighting.
Randall, too, is
a shadowy authority figure in the poems in this issue of Octopus. In
"
One concept
important to Randall is the templum -- the framing of
an arbitrary portion of one's perception in order to focus upon it and
generalize from it. So, an oracle would make a templum--
a rectangle with his fingers and thumbs, like on the Nationwide Insurance ads
-- and would hold the rectangle up to an area of the sky and would wait. And if
something or nothing happened in that area of visual space during the duration
he focused on it, then that something or nothing would have some significance
that the oracle could interperet.
Anyway, I
ditched once the chickens were gone, but I left the camera with Randall. He'd
heard about an old woman who lived on the side of a hill outside of town and
had a whole mess of cats on leashes. It's one of the best films I've ever seen.
--Chris Vitiello
_________________________________________________________________________
I decided
to sing to the dead fox. Last night, listening to Roger Miller, driving to Ken’s
house, I struck a hawk with my car’s fender. Metallic green spots had already
started to swarm. My friend who drove a tank for the U.S. Army said commanders
chose gunners according to video rankings. Volume seemed to be an extension of
sight. I drug a lawn chair over and finger-picked a G. When Matthew Barney,
playing Gary Gilmore, shot a gas station attendant, I closed my eyes. It’s feathers looked magnificent and yellow. I don’t know
why it was in the road. Six people stood around a red and white beach towel.
The wind picked up, but I don’t think it was God. I nearly had to climb under
my desk to poke the muzzle through the patch-sized hole in the screen. Of
course I dream about sizzling wicks. Digging a hole offers its own pleasure. I
wondered if they had changed topics, given that all of their arms were crossed.
The dripping made it look like it’s nose was a plastic
jewel. Did it think the double lines were a wall? The choice of discordant
notes made the trees fold. I sliced through various roots. It lifted its legs
as if bound, hog tied or stretching. Left eye, right eye,
left eye, right eye. Do they really think violent acts are not
surrounded by household objects? It appeared to be leaping. If there’s one
thing chickens are good for it’s responding to events with commotion. I can’t
blink with my left eye. It flew off somewhere into the periphery. From a
distance, I thought they were standing around a campaign sign. One electron per
atom is dedicated to intimidation. Here is why I like wax. My hand cramped so I
switched to E. It wasn’t Lau Tzu’s wife, but a similar (or the same?) river.
Yellow leaves fall around a bayonet. I decided that it should keep its head
below ground. As Tony said, A = . I tried to return, then I tried to hide my keys. It ran below my front tire, I
swear. Maybe the Pantheon was a joke and they just wanted to murder shit on a
hill. I can’t tell if its simulation or violence that bothers me. I can’t tell
where violence begins and ends. The ridiculous thing was that a shooting star
passed behind their heads. I wanted to be respectful so I photographed myself
buying cheese. What they advertise as violence is really a reaction to
loneliness and fear. Their fur is softest around their mouths. It didn’t take
long. On the package, they even call it the killing bar. Of course, I “put it
out of it’s misery.” I wanted to lean close, though,
and listen to its breathing. I wanted to feel its and my passing. Isaac never
had a son. I placed them behind the refrigerator and left the room. It wasn’t
its difficulty, but its ease. I stopped right before turning it into a moral.
ANN AND ANTLERS THEN (to open up the
twilight of the form)
The Sheraton is burning
to pieces then
obliterated at the half shell
legs, I mean, a concrete
portico
sent across the orchard
feet were wax hooves
that were feet
slippers nevermore on a
child
rimmed eyes— blue
as a daguerreotype
sobbing
with flippers locomoting
toward some hole in the
stars
To debate its misery: how
the pink skyscraper
bends toward a cove
or how
men below rush models
round
lackless socket creatures,
refresh
a soldier’s torso
into nails
warmed, beyond glass, a
grove
with Janet-- her
friends on a curve
And so I am bedding for what she calls
She drives my gallant restless fear
recklessly
To know an armful of the previous beast—
on into the orchard
for many reasons
the wheelbarrow in
danger now
I will ride it home unanimated
the paint, or
replacement fur
tan until lumbering
unnamed
It must have clipped two, she said
I agreed, embarrassed and laughing
at how she conceived
of the antlers
picking and gathering then
shards of
from the field
Beautiful duchess,
you are memorabilia and a pair of crow eyes. Red and black flecks cover my
tilted leaves. Two black squares joke a rain of sorcery and wood. I have
disassembled the tanning bed, the silver hamper and put them into a box. Two
blue Recycling bins mediate my view of the Republicans across the street. My
viewfinder yields sound: a river of needles, an ocean of birds, I-40 outside
officer, to cold cup of
tea a caldera
kiava trees planted to
prevent natives
from walking naked
thorny blankets
vines cutting through
sand, the outline
of an esophagus
typewritten in ink, a haiku
shimmering in walls, ghost-like,
nasty and red
sweet as lily songs
I am the two
prongs’ patrons
singing to lambs, rogue
nettle ridges…
inscaping receptionists,
recruiters, a beast
mimicking a clippers’ gaits
horses adrift in the
number six
one million people
doing their laundry
you get home now,
ageless flower
as if it were…
she placed…
carcinogenic pumice bugling
source of curdled splash
the night table’s
transparency
why, then, a goddess
or garden taste
beneath the lethal moon
a swim suit brocade
of apples
chanting
the rim is visible through a screen of light and leaves
the Heaou lines squares
like leaf spittle
like a lion’s mane
a racing stripe in )) focus
(basketballs are light)
salt and pepper performing thin cylinders of water
perfect in all respects
Jake’s lips flash from gold to silver to
bronze. My father turns his back before grieving. He stretches his
fingers, a kind of kindling, over cracked e’s, personal
constellations, sticks and barbs, husks lying in a strange geometry. His heel
jams into the mix, flattening detritus to scale. He defines his day’s intent:
to slam four storm doors at once.
Pools beneath him sop with leaves, while
toes edge forward for Astroturf. He jumps to watch the reflections rush forth.
The mausoleums resemble neoclassical clubhomes. He lays on the ground and pretends to be reposed, holding
tobacco leaves whose veins show brown falling down and over like a sheet. He
imagines his skin is a notebook and so begins rolling.
His grandmother’s headstone, erected
minutes early, makes the diggers drowsy. They have been trying to bury
turnstiles all morning, but the wind and rain won’t let them. Arms will not
stay fixed to the clock. The mind can comprehend its uselessness.
The man inside the marble room crosses his
thumbs: How do I pack one shirt into four suitcases? The air within his
lungs—is it alive or dead? His widow, far away, contemplates a plastic gallon,
unsure if her husband drowned in water, wave or ocean.
She remembers this: knuckles bleeding in
the elevator, crumpled digits as he pitifully fumed. You have to stop
swinging at red flags. Nightshirts drawn. Power
pools as if on sheeting. A scythe cuts its handle. A stove burns its home. He
smashes a guard gate each morning.
II.
Eddy recalls hatcheting
branches for his Uncle, then staking them in the ground as if trees. A nearby
river etches against itself: a signature stamp of eroded rubber. He
experimented on those self-same banks, curious if a page or road-killed
squirrel would decay first. He entered the results into The General
Principles of Pliability:
1.
Looking from the side view eliminates the side view
2.
Memories of most objects are divided by the nose
3.
The sun is always set
4.
5.
Gravity only has to stop working for a second
Falling into cellulose like his son, he
drops his pen, careful not to hit his head on stone. Eddy knows they use his
body against him. He quivers as the planets fall: Dirty thick skin,
remorseful invoice, rid me as I ride you. Melt beneath portals. Their wands are
my eyes.
He sees himself as they see him: cordless
legs of plastic, a wagon at his midriff. A mirror would be too obvious, so they
polish the jail constantly. Up opposes down, and is likewise a conduit. Is his
yowl a firebrand entryway or exit? He continues to search for food amid the
linoleum aisles and rows.
In his living room he harvests shame’s follicles.
The shimmering gloss of glass jars, the fact that they walk upside down, makes
his door handles seem low. Their bodies offer proof that we have not died. Distance
fails to recede. Outside, Giacometti builds an
invisible fence. Eddy stands in a roaring roundtable, pondering alien ideograms
which spell Sponsored Sex in Air. He reacts by howling. A
terrific yawn, blinking the opposite of loss.
III.
Multiple hues course Jake’s bones, while relatives
fuse and warp. A screen lies crumpled at his feet. He tinkers with a projector,
trying to get it to inhale its own image and reverse the day’s carnage. The
ground has been pelting the sky relentlessly, forming a ceiling of smoke. The
tyrant has a black box of air wedged between his shoulder blades and heart.
When children hear Whitman’s poetry read
aloud, their bodies have been known to dissipate. Waking with pockets sewn to
his hips, Jake checks the tautness of a cord tied around a trunk. They say he
is made of cells. Emblem ramblers of needle and stitch add saddlebags to his
silhouette. They try to convince him they are actually attractive long gloves.
How many kinds of violences
are there? What is the etymology of my hand? This is no sinister inscription,
but self-images being introduced. A woman standing in water, holding resumes
drenched in serum. Beneath the coliseum’s textured steps, a
well resembling a cage. Within those mortared stones, tender pacings and an answering machine. This line exists so you may sense the
breaths between and behind the words.
IV.
The windows are dark because no one is
working. Jake enters the lobby to find Hume casting poker chips in an
arc pattern. The man has printed 104 images on the backs and fronts of 52
cards. Their values change as the game continues. Jake slams his fist into the
felt. Everyone at the table simultaneously sees variations of the same image:
Russian dolls rolling down footnotes. How, again, are we suppose to trick
one another into insight?
Eddy, meanwhile, has listed a thousand gesture unassociated with tasks. Sometimes they are vague
enough as to cancel each other out—lifting a bucket of water, for instance, and
dragging out one’s life tale. He props
his arms akimbo while a friend weaves diamond patterns of polyester between his
angled forearms and biceps. The primary colors are those of a stainglass window or clown suit. Attach this string to a
monument, Eddy asks. And I will fly below.
How many serpents live below the kernels
and lids? A passing light reveals 100 eyes peering from 200 battlements. Shuttering commotion in yellow. Here’s how space works:
their eyes, their colors are made between and by the wires. Not blackbirds,
lost words.
Trophies made of quartz and plastic:
The grid’s purpose is to free its contents.
Avian screens of hunger manifest into proximate divinity. Winter cuts across
Thus begins the field of ricketed visions: Hollows flashing through eyes, acorns
broken by hooves, glasses emptied of beanboard, fires
running along floods. This land is built into cathedrals, forcing drivers to
look up where constellations fall onto hillsides, where work clothes drape
chair backs. The now warped record tosses the phonograph’s needle so sound
comes from the woods, where illicit profits flow into
They burn rhodendrun:
Their floorboards are filled with lakes and lids: Their gospel voices echo
through copper and sink into moss and shale. One brambled
speaker --lit by orange and blue-- courts warrens and tempts blindness. And
his hands salved the parched wounds. And his hands healed our hearts of
loneliness. And his hands. His
hands. Hands. Centipedes crawl near their
heads while they sleep.
II.
Home is no place, but a series of
concentric visitations. Winter slips into bed beside Irene. Rocks anchor
National Geographics from the incoming wind and,
flanking the vanity, family portraits tilt toward pillows. Here is Winter’s hope: Birds, sent into the dictionary, flying
crossways, will find aquifers from the air.
Yet his Mercuries
remain under jute, experiencing slivers of wakefulness, phototropic language,
as moonlight arcs overhead like a bent page. Photo paper torn, scattered,
exposed, scenery demolished—oaks upside down, owners wedged, an
hourglass with a broken base. Handfuls of sea released into turbulent sea.
And here is the crux: their freedom lies
wanting. Not ravenous, but the sudden desire for symmetry. They seek a woodcut
long-since launched into the forest. Is there a counter-veiling wind that could
make them flee back toward the broken glass?
Is this a cruel beloving?
To drag the October rake and assume they will be coming home? They climb to the
sentence’s brambled end, only to slide back toward
the Capital. They speak in ghosts, while their relatives gather around the
corner. Birds are not a testament to flight, but ground. The boy knows this:
Large shards of land float up, blue stages tumble and disperse, entire classes
dream of Helium.
Yet the important things for him are the
unfamiliar folds. How many hands has this stone passed through? His brother
Alfred is reading right now. His mind is busting in anticipation, his hand is
out the window. Not the content, but the
box. His lexicon is flooded in atomic metonymy. He imagines the weathered one
in front, charting his course with the wind’s haphazard, looking down on verbs.
The birds carry empty words as if branches. That is
40 years is not long enough. 50 mph x
450 miles, 2 hour flight time with 30 minute breaks. Winter’s life
continues unpunctured, fixating on the drying
process. Bowers rise from the margins to assert new orders. Not a V,
but a line. The
newspaper boxes (fit into) graffiti (fit into) a
woman walking (fit into)
smoke (fit into) pigs (fit
into) orange netting (fit into)
flip clocks of images (fit
into) a tool shed (fit into) tributaries (fit into)
rancor (fit into) blood rolled in sand (fit into) a hurricane (fit into)
a crowbar
(fit into) cat vomit
(fit into) suited humiliation (fit
into)…
When the future is taxed he begins
recalling the past:
His fingerprints are all over the
fuselage. The pilot notices the sky is painted like a mural. He remembers
seeing birds, trapped inside a museum, crashing against paint. He fidgets on
war’s extension, while doves coo behind him.
Winter selects those that are dramatically
engaged: one watches while the other drags its tail across the floor. Sinners,
since Abraham, have sent them to God. (A negative sentence does not still
get the point across). So Winter carries two postcards
reading, These are not bombs, across the tarmac and straps them into the
pilot’s rib cage. Red rings, like Shivaistic anklets,
sense alarm and conchodial fracturing.
It is a wonder war can fly at all. Morals
should be left like land, Winter surmises, yet why do these people not dig deep holes for
rabid landings? He ponders the example of Orville and
Wilbur, who almost immediately sold flight to the Army.
But Winter
imagines that his birds are not crushed by their own tails. They do not return
to the Allied coop either. They fly toward
ANSWER: …Eddy sprawls Winter
across the dining room table. His muscles think they are opening a foldout
chair. The gauze curtain gets caught on
III.
Somewhere midflight,
the carriers’ bodies are pulled beneath transmissions. Their wings --ta ta dum ta dum
ta ta dum--
precipitously hover, proving that flight exists independent of wings and
projectiles. At the bottom of the road, Winter sees a
woman struggling to lift an anvil. She screams, Anvil! Anvil!, and
carries it away. She has always had hammer, fire and a sense of her own breath.
There are two birds in the fuselage, and two birds within those birds, etc.
So Winter enters
his waiting. Longing is a symmetrical emotion, he hypothesizes, while
its satiation is always awry. Other birds now do not so much as move
through air as collaborate with it, electricity coursing through their feathers
and thrusts.
COURSING TABLE FULL OF QUIETUDE
on the back of my
hand
in ballpoint pen
a spiral of palms
quietly beckons
nest cast up now
the mouse I killed
last night
appears to have been
asleep
(a street lamp
recedes backwards
then blossoms
inside a box)
not so much before
but a white moth
caught then enumerated
Saint Gabriel, I am running one very passionate mile-- a Mendicant and a bag of larks. Her clothes belong in a truck. My father and I share a bed: his father, a ghost descending. Some snowflakes are called bullets with dendrites, while others are stellar crystals with needles. If men are frightened of levers. Margaret Sanger once measured her teeth, and called