This Is the Time for Which We Have Been Waiting

   Dear Jim,

     I finally got your letter enclosing
 Your letter enclocussing your letter which was so
 ompportant foe me, thannkouk yuon very much. In time
 This fainful bsiness will will soonfeul will soon
 Be onert.Tnany anany goodness. If S lossiee eii
 Wyyonor wy sinfsignature.

       I hope I hope I make it.

      	    Bill

The first snowfall brings chaos.
First the horizon disappears, then
you disappear. When

William Carlos Williams suffered his first stroke
he was 68 years old, in 1951. His second,
the following year. The man loved

our American speech. Vulgar & graceless

as oversized boots he loved it. The pimply-
faced girl he loved. Forms inside things gnarly

to the touch. Smokestacks, mustard weed.
The steely river filling with acid & sparrows
picking in the dirt, like Death. Yet

still just sparrows. Beauty of marigolds,
& fried oysters. Beauty of spiderwebs,

Breughel’s hunters in the snow. Except

maybe what the poet saw & heard
was in his own head! Maybe in Rutherford,
N.J. there was nothing. Maybe

he was in despair, fierce lover
of women & adulterer & this morning waking to discover

someone has dressed him in an old man’s underwear–

gunmetal-gray, woollen-itchy, soiled cuffs
at bony wrists & ankles & the crotch unsnapped.
Opens his mouth to curse

& words choke like phlegm. A doctor doesn’t expect
to die like the rest of us . . . Waking in the sun
in Flossie’s garden back of the yellow house

the terror strikes him maybe he’s dreamt it all?–male
hands lifting a thrashing bloody infant
from between female thighs, &

ironweed along the railroad embankment
tough enough to thrive in cinders, &
there he’s laughing typing on the old manual

words leaping astonished out of the mute keyboard, keys
so worn you can’t read the letters. And
those clouds–

Clouds I’ve been noticing this morning, too.
Diesel-dirtied, broken & yet dignified in motion
moving from west to east effortless above the pines

in this New Jersey smudged sky. In March 1963

the final stroke. “Died in his sleep.” Eyes
moving restlessly down the naked body.

On a gurney? Since when? The shock of it, his young
male body restored. Svelte dark down of the chest,
groin & soft stirring penis. Winter-pale

haunches, muscles hard as bone. Lifts
his head. Where? Christ he’s alert, he’s curious–

ready to begin it all again–

This is the time for which we have been waiting.

Note: The letter from William Carlos Williams to his friend and editor James Laughlin was written sometime shortly prior to June 1962 when Williams’ last book, Pictures From Breughel, was published.