Classic Audiobook Collection - Sour Grapes by William Carlos Williams ~ Full Audiobook [poetry]

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Sour Grapes by William Carlos Williams audiobook. Genre: poetry Sour Grapes is an early, punchy collection of poems by William Carlos Williams that helps define an American modernist voice: local, plainspoken, and startlingly alive to the physical world. Moving from quick, image-driven lyrics to more expansive reflections, Williams trains his attention on everyday scenes - a street corner, a room, a body at work, a sudden change of weather - and turns them into moments of sharp perception. The poems favor clean lines, fresh metaphors, and the belief that meaning is not imported from distant ideals but discovered in the immediate present, in the grit and beauty of common life. Across the collection, you can hear a restless intelligence testing what poetry can do with ordinary language, while also feeling the undercurrent of desire, irritation, tenderness, and longing that gives the book its title bite. Sour Grapes invites listeners into a world where small things matter, where seeing clearly is a moral act, and where the music of speech becomes a new kind of lyric truth. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:29:40) Chapter 02 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sour Grapes, Part 1. The late singer. Here it is spring again, and I still a young man. I'm late at my singing. The sparrow with a black rain on his breast has been at his cadenzas for two weeks past. What is it that is dragging at my heart? The grass by the back door is stiff with sap. The old maples are opening their branches of brown and yellow moth flowers. A moon hangs in the blue. in the early afternoons over the marshes. I'm late at my singing. March.

1. Winter is long in this climate, and spring, a matter of a few days only, a flower or two picked from mud or from among wet leaves, or at best, against treacherous bitterness of wind and sky shining teasingly, then closing in black and sudden, with fierce jaws. 2. March. you remind me of the pyramids, our pyramids,

stripped of the polished stone that used to god them. March, you are like Fra Angelico at Friossoli, painting on plaster. March, you are like a band of young poets that have not learned the blessedness of warmth, or have forgotten it. At any rate, I move to write poetry for the warmth there is in it, and for the loneliness,

a poem that shall have you in it, March. 3. See? Archer Bonipal, the Archer King on horseback and blue and yellow enamel, withdrawn bow-facing lions, standing on their hind legs, fangs bared, his shafts bristling in their necks. Sacred bulls, dragons in embossed brickwork marching, in four tiers, along the sacred way to Nebuchard-Nasar's throne hall. They shine in the sun, they that have been marching. marching under the dust of 10,000 dirt years. Now they are coming into bloom again.

See them marching still, bared by the storms from my calendar. Winds that blow back the sand. Winds that infallad dirt. Winds that by strange craft have whipped up a black army that by pick and shovel bear a procession to the god, Marduk. Natives cursing and digging for pay unearthed dragons with bright tails and sacred bulls alternately,

and four tears, lying in the way to an old altar, natives digging at old walls, digging me warmth, digging me sweet loneliness, high enameled walls. Four, my second spring, passed in a monastery with plaster walls in Friosoli on the hill above Florence. My second spring,

painted a virgin in a blue ariole, sitting on a three-legged stool, arms crossed, she is intently serious, and still watching an angel with colored wings half-nealing before her, in smiling, the angel's eyes holding the eyes of Mary as a snake's holds the birds. On the ground there are flowers, trees are in leaf. Five, but now for the battle, now for murder, now for the real thing, my third springtime is approaching. Winds, lean, serious as a virgin, seeking, seeking, the flowers of march. Seeking flowers nowhere to be found, they twine among the bare branches, and insatiable eagerness, they whirl up the snow, seeking under it. They, the winds, snake-like, roar among yellow reeds, seeking flowers, flowers. I spring among them, seeking one flower in

which to warm myself. I deride with all the ridicule of misery, my own starved misery. Countercutting winds strike against me, refreshing their fury. Come, good cold fellows, have we no flowers? Defy then with even more desperation than ever, being lean and frozen. But though you are lean and frozen, think of the blue bowls of Babylon. Fling yourselves upon their empty roses, cut savagely, but think of the painted monastery at Fiasole, Birkett and the stars. A day on the boulevards, chosen out of ten years of student-population, poverty. One best day out of ten good ones. Burk it and high spirits. Hi, oranges, let's have one. And he made to snatch an orange from the vendor's cart. Now so clever was the deception, so nicely timed to the

full sweep of certain wave's summits, that the rumor of the thing has come down through three generations, which is relatively forever. A celebration. A middle northern march, now as always, gusts from the south broken against cold winds, but from under, as if a slow hand lifted the tide, it moves, not into April, into a second march, the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping upon the mold. This is the shadow projects the tree upward, causing the sun to shine in his sphere. So we will put on our pink-felt hat. New last year, newer this by virtue of brown eyes turning back the seasons, and let us walk to the orchard house. See the flowers will take the prize tomorrow at the palace. Stop here. These are oleanders, when they are in bloom. You would waste

words. It is clearer to me than if the pink were on the branch. It would be a searching and a colored cloud to reveal that which now, huskless, shows the very reason for their being. And these the orange trees and blossom. No need to tell with this weight of perfume in the air. And if it were not so dark in the shed, one could better see the white. It is that very perfume has drawn the darkness down among the leaves. Do I speak clearly enough? It is the darkness reveals that which darkness alone loosens and sets spinning on waxen wings, not the touch of a fingertip, not the motion of a sigh. A too heavy sweetness proves its own caretaker. And here are the orchids, Never having seen such gaiety, I will read these flowers for you.

This is an odd January, died in Elon's time. Snow, this is, and this the stain of a violet grew in that place, the spring that foresaw its own doom. And this a certain July from Iceland, a young woman of that place, breathed it toward the south. It took root there. The color ran true, but the plant is small. This falling spray of snowflakes is a handful of dead februaries, prayed into flower by Raphael Arrivalo Martinez of Guatemala. Here's that old friend who went by my side so many years,

this full, fragile head of veined lavender. Oh, that April that we first went with our stiff lus leaving the city behind, out to the green hill, May they said she was, a hand for all of us, this branch of blue butterflies tied to the stem. June is a yellow cup I'll not name. August, the over-heavy one, and here are russet and shiny all but March. And March? Ah, March. Flowers are a tiresome pastime. One has a wish to shake them from their

pots, root and stem, for the sun to gnaw. Walk out again into the cold and saunter home to the fire. This day has blossomed long enough. I've wiped out the red night, and lit a blaze instead, which will at least warm our hands and stir up the fire. the talk. I think we have kept fair time. Time is a green orchid. April. If you had come away with me into another state, we had been quiet together. But there the sun coming up out of the nothing beyond the lake was too low in the sky. It was too great at pushing against him, too much of sumac buds, pink in the head with a clear gum upon them, too many opening hearts of lilac leaves, Too many. Too many swollen, limp poplar tassels on the bare branches.

It was too strong in the air. I had no rest against that springtime. The pounty of the hoofs on the raw sods stayed with me, half through the night. I awoke smiling, but tired. A good night. Go to sleep, though of course you will not. To tideless waves, thundering slantwise against strong embankments, rattle and swish of spray dashed thirty feet high, caught by the lake wind, scattered in, strewn, broadcast in over the steady car rails. Sleep, sleep, gulls cry in a wind gust broken by the wind, calculating wings set above the field of waves breaking. Goat to sleep to the lunge between foam

cress, refuse, churned in the recoil, food, food, oafel, oafel that holds them in the air, wave white with one purpose, feather upon feather, the wild chill in their eyes, the hoarseness in their voices. Sleep, sleep. Gentle-footed crowds are treading out your lullaby. Their arms nudge. They brush shoulders, hitched this way, then that, mass, and surge at the crossings. Lullaby, lullaby. The wild, foul police whistles, the enraged roar of the traffic, machine shrieks. It is all to put you to sleep, to soften your limbs in relaxed postures, and that your head slip sideways, and your hair loosen and fall over your eyes and over your mouth, brushing your lips wistfully that you may dream. Sleep and dream. A black fungus springs out about lonely church doors.

Sleep, sleep, the night coming down upon the wet boulevard would start you awake with his message to have in at your window. Pay no heed to him. He says, He storms at your sill with coolings, with gestulations, curses. You'll not let him in. He would keep you from sleeping. He would have you sit under your desk lamp, brooding, pondering. He would have you slide out the drawer, take up the ornamented dagger, and handle it. It is late.

It is nineteen-ninete. Go to sleep. His cries are a lullaby. He is jabbering as a sleep, well, my baby. He is a cracked-brain messenger. The maid, waking you in the morning when you are up and dressing, the rustle of your clothes as you raise them. It is the same tune.

At table the cold, greenish, split grapefruit, its juice on the tongue, the chink of the spoon in your coffee, the toast odors say it over and over. The open street door lets in the breath of the morning wind from over the lake. The bus coming to a halt, grinds from its sullen brakes. Lullaby. by, the crackle of a newspaper, the movement of a troubled coat beside you. Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

It is the sting of snow, the burning liquor of the moonlight, the rush of rain and the gutters, packed with dead leaves. Go to sleep, go to sleep, and the night passes. It never passes. Overture to a dance of locomotas. 1. Men with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling. The rubbing feet of those coming to be carried

quicken a gray pavement into soft light that rocks to and fro, under the domed ceiling, across and across from pale earth-colored walls, a bare limestone. Covertly, the hands of a great clock go round and round, were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever. A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing at a high window, moves by the clock, disaccordant hands straining out from a center, inevitable postures infinitely repeated. Two. Two, two four, two eight, porters and red hats run on narrow platforms.

way, ma'am. Important not to take the wrong train. Lights from the concrete ceiling hang crooked, but poised horizontal on, glittering parallels, the dingy cylinders, packed with a warm glow, inviting entry, pull against the hour, but brakes can hold a fixed posture till the whistle. Not two-eight, not two-four, two, gliding windows, colored cook sweating in a small kitchen, Tail lights. In time, two four, in time, two eight. Rivers are tunneled. Tressels cross Uzi Swampland. Wheels repeating the same gesture remain relatively stationary. Rails forever parallel return on themselves infinitely. The dance is sure. Romance modern. Tracks of rain and light linger in the spongy greens of a nature whose flickering mountain, bulging nearer, ebbing

back into the sun hollowing itself away to hold a lake, or brown stream rising and falling at the roadside, turning about, churning itself white, drawing green in over it, plunging, glassy funnels fall. And the other world, the windshield, a blunt barrier, talk to me. Shh, they would hear us, the back of their heads facing us, the stream continues its motion of a hound running over rough ground. trees vanish reappear vanish

detached dance of gnomes as a talk dodging remarks glows and fades the unseen power of words and now that a few of the moves

are clear the first desire is to fling oneself out at the side and to the other dance to other music Piergint Rip Van Winkle

Diana If I were young I would try a new alignment A light nimbly from the car Goodbye Childhood companions link two and two, criss-cross, four, three, two, one, back into self, tentacles withdrawn, feel about and warm self-flesh, since childhood, since childhood.

Childhood is a toad in the garden, a happy toad, all toads are happy and belong in gardens, a toad toad to Diana. Lean forward, punch the steersman behind the ear, twirl the wheel, over the edge, screams, crash. The end. I sit above my head, a little removed, or a thin wash of rain on the roadside, and I am never afraid when he is driving, interposes new direction, rides us sideways, unforeseen into the ditch, all threads cut, death, black, the end, the very end. I would sit separate, weighing a small red handful, the dirt of these parts, sliding, miss sheeting, the adlers against the touch of fingers creeping to mine. All stuff are the blind emotions, but stirred, the eye seizes for the first time,

the eye awake, anything, a dirt bank with green stars of scrawny weed flattened upon it under a weight of air for the first time, or a yawning depth, big, swim around in it, through it, all directions, and find vitreous seawater stuff. God, how I love you, or as I say, a plunge into the ditch, the end. I sit examining my red handful, balancing this, in and out. Ah! Love you? It's a fire in the blood, willy-nilly.

It's the sun coming up in the morning. Ha, but it's the gray moon, too, already up in the morning. You are slow. Men are not friends where it concerns a woman? Fighters, playfellows, white round thighs, youth, sighs. It's the philip of novelty. It's mountains, elephants, humping along against the sky, indifferent to light, withdrawing its tattered shreds, worn out with embraces. It's the fill-up of novelty. It's a fire in the blood.

Oh, get a flannel shirt, white flannel or pangy. You'd look so well. I married you because I liked your nose. I wanted you. I wanted you, in spite of all they'd say. Rain and light, mountain and rain, rain and river, will you love me always? A car overturned and two crushed bodies under it. Always, always, and the white moon already up. White, clean, all the colors. A good head backed by the eye, awake, backed by the emotions, blind, river and mountain, light and rain, or rain, rock, light, trees, divide it. Rain, light, counter, rocks, trees, or trees counter, rain, light, rocks, or myriads of counter-percessions, crossing and recrossing, regaining the advantage, buying here, selling there, you were sold cheap everywhere in town.

Lingering, touching fingers, withdrawing, gathering forces into blare's hummocks, peaks, and rivers, river meeting rock, I wish that you were lying there dead and I sitting here beside you. It's the gray moon, over and over, it's the clay of these parts. desolate field. Vast and gray, the sky is a simulacrum, to all but him whose days are vast and gray, and in the tall, dry grasses, a goat-sters with nozzle searching the ground. My head is in the air, but who am I? And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love, vast and gray, yearning, silently over me. Willow poem. It is a willow when summer is over. It is over. It is over. It is a willow by the river from which no leaf has fallen, nor bitten by the sun, turned orange or crimson.

The leaves cling and grow paler, swing and grow paler, over the swirling waters of the river, as if loath to let go. They are so cool, so drunk with the swirl of the wind and of the river, oblivious to winter, the last to let go and fall into the water and on the ground. approach of winter. The half-stripped trees struck by a wind together, bending all the leaves fluttered dryly, and refused to let go or, driven like hail, streamed bitterly out to one side,

and fall where the salvia's hard carmine, like no leaf that ever was, Edge, the bare garden. January. Again I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fits of derision outside my window. Play louder. You will not succeed. I'm bound more to my sentences, the more you batter at me to follow you, and the wind as before. Fingers perfectly its derisive music. Blizzard. Snow, years of anger following hours

that float idly down. The blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun, a clutter of yellow and blue flakes, hairy-looking trees stand out and long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns, and there his solitary track stretched out, upon the world. To waken an old lady. Old age is a flight of small, cheeping birds, skimming bare trees, above a snow glaze, gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind. But what? On harsh weeds stalks, the flock is rested, the snow is covered with broken seed huss, and the wind tempered by a shrill piping of plenty. Winter trees. All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed. The liquid moon moves gently among the long branches, thus having

prepared their buds against a sure winter, the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold. Complaint. They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheel tracks. The door opens. I smile, enter, and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy, joy. Night has a room darkened for lovers. Through the jealousies, the sun has sent one gold needle. I picked the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion. A cold night. It is cold. The white moon is up above her scattered stars, like the bare thighs of the police

sergeant's wife, among her five children. No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass. One answer. It is midnight, it is still, and it is cold, white thighs at the sky, a new answer out of the depths of a male belly. In April, in April, I shall see again, in April, the round and perfect thighs of the police sergeant's wife, perfect, still after many babies. Oh yeah, spring storm. The sky has given over its bitterness, out of the dark change all day long, rain falls and falls as if it would never end. Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground, but water, water from the thousand runnels. It collects swiftly, dappled with black, cuts away for itself, through green ice in the gutters, drop after drop it falls from the withered grass stems of the overhanging

embankment. The delicacies. The hostess in pink satin and blonde hair, dressed high, shown beautifully in her white slippers against the great silent, bald head of her little-eyed husband, raising a glass of yellow-rined wine and the narrow space just beyond the light-varnished woodwork and the decorative column between dining-room and hall. She smiled the smile of water, tumbling from one ledge to another. We began with a herring salad, delicately flavored saltiness in scallops of lettuce leaves. The little owl-eyed and thick-set lady with masses of gray hair has smooth pink cheeks without her ankle. She cannot be the daughter of the little red-faced fellow dancing about, inviting lion-headed Wolf, the druggist, to play the piano.

What she is! Wolf is a terrific smoker. The telephone goes off at night, so his curled-haired wife whispers. He rises from bed, but cannot answer till he has lighted a cigarette. Sherry wine and little conical glasses, dull, brownish, yellow, and tomatoes stuffed with fondly cut chicken and mayonnaise. The tall Irishman and a prince Almond. and the usual striped trousers is going to sing for us. The piano is in a little alcove with dark curtains. The hostess's sister, ten years younger than she, in black net and velvet, has hair like some filmy haystack, cloudy about the eyes. She will play for her husband. My wife is young. Yes, she is young and pretty when she cares to be, when she is interested

in a discussion. It is the little dancing mayor's wife, telling her of the day nursery in East Rutherford, crossed the track, divided from us by the railroad, and disputes as to precedence. It is in this town the saloon flourishes, the saloon of my friend on the right, whose wife has twice offended with chance words.

Her English is atrocious. It is in this town that the saloon is situated, close to the railroad track, close as may be, this side being dry, dry, dry, two people listening, on opposite sides of a wall. The day nursery had 65 babies the week before last,

so my wife's size shine and her cheeks are pink and I cannot see a blemish. Ice cream and the shape of flowers and domestic objects. A pipe for me since I do not smoke. A doll for you. The figure is some great bulk of a woman disappearing into the kitchen with a quick look over the shoulder. My friend on the left who has spent the whole day in a car, the like of which some old fellow would give to an actress. Flower-holders, mirrors, curtains, plush seats,

my friend on the left who was chairman of the streets committee of the town council, and who spent the whole day studying automobile fire engines in neighboring towns, view of purchase. My friend, at the Elks last week, at the breaking up hymn, signaled for them to let Bill, a familiar friend of the saloon-keeper, sing out all alone to the organ, and he did sing. Souse rolls, exquisite, and rind wine, adly bite him, a masterly caviar sandwich.

The children flitting about above stairs, the councilman has just bought a national eight, some car. For heaven's sake, I mustn't forget the halves of green peppers, stuffed with cream cheese and whole walnuts. Thursday. I've had my dream, like others, and it has come to nothing, so that I've been to remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky, feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body and my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose,

and decide to dream no more. The dark day. A three-day long rain from the east, an interminable talking, talking of no consequence, patter, patter, patter, patter, hand in hand, little winds blow the thin streams a slant. Warm, distance cut off, seclusion. A few passers by, drawn in upon themselves, hurry, from one place to another. Winds of the white poppy, there is no escape, an interminable talking, talking, talking, it has happened before, backward, backward, backward, time the hangman. Poor old Abner, old white-haired nigger. I remember when you were so strong you hung yourself by a rope round the neck and Doc Hollister's barn to prove you could beat the faker in the circus, and it didn't kill you. Now your face is in your hands, and your elbows are on your knees,

and you are silent and broken, to a friend. Well, Lizzie Anderson, 17 men and the baby hard to find a father for. What will the good father in heaven say to the local judge if he does not solve this problem. A little two-pointed smile and, poof, the law is changed into a mouthful of phrases. The gentleman. I feel the caress of my own fingers on my own neck as I place my collar and think pittingly of the kind women I have known. The sloughing wind. Some leaves hang late, some fall before the first frost, so goes the tail of winter branches, and Old bones. Spring. Oh, my grey hairs, you are truly white as plump blossoms.

Play. Suttal, clever brain, wiser than I am, by what devious means do you contrive to remain idle? Teach me, O master. End of Sour grapes, Part 2 by William Carlos Williams. This Liebervalk's recording is in the public domain. Lines. Leaves are green-gray, the glass broken, bright green, the poor. By constantly tormenting them with reminders of the lice in their children's hair, the school physician first brought their hatred down on him, but by this familiarity they grew used to him, and so at last took him for

their friend and advisor. Complete destruction. It was an icy day we'd be. buried the cat, then took her box and set fire to it in the backyard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold. Memory of April. You say love is this, love is that, poplar tassels, willow tendrils, the wind and the rain comb, tinkle and drip, tinkle and drip, branches drifting apart. Huck! Love has not even visited this country. Epitaph. Epit An old willow with hollow branches slowly swayed her few high bright tendrils and sang. Love is a young green willow, shimmering at the barewood's edge. Daisy

The day's eye hugging the earth in August. Ah! Spring has gone down in purple. We'd stand high in the corn. The rain-beaten furrow is clotted with sorrel and crabgrass. The branch is black under the heavy mass of the leaves. The sun is upon a slender green stem, ripped lengthways. He lies on his back, it is a woman also. He regards his former majesty, and round the yellow center, split and creviced and done into minute flower-heads. He sends out his twenty rays, a little, and the wind is among them to grow cool there.

One turns the thing over in his hand and looks at it from the rear. Brown-edged, green and pointed scales, his yellow, but turns the thing over in his hand. Turn and turn, the crisp petals remain, brief, translucent, green fastened, barely touching at the edges, blades of limpid sea-shell. Primrose. Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow. It is not a color, it is summer. It is the wind on a willow. The lap of waves, the shadow under a bush, a bird, a bluebird, three herons, a dead hawk,

rotting on a pole. Clear yellow. It is a piece of blue paper in the grass, or a three-cluster of, green walnuts swaying. Children. Children playing croquet or one-boy fishing, a man swinging his pink fists as he walks. It is lady's thumb. Forget-me-nots in the ditch. Moss under the flange of the car rail, the wavy lines and split rock, a great oak tree. It is a disinclination to be five red petals or a rose. It is a cluster of bird's breast flowers on a red stem, six feet high, four open yellow, petals above sepals curl backward into reverse spikes. Tufts of purple grass spot the green

meadow and clouds the sky. Queen Anne's lace. Her body is not so white as anemone petals, nor so smooth, nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot, taking the field by force. The grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as it can be with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibers of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over, or nothing. Great mullin.

One leaves his leaves at home, being a mullin, and sends up a lighthouse to peer from. I will have my way, yellow. Amassed with a lantern, ten, fifty, a hundred, smaller and smaller as they grow more. Liar, liar, liar! You come from her. I can smell her kiss on your clothes. Ha, ha, you come to me, you. I am a point of dew on a grass stem. Why are you sending heat down on me from your land? You are cow dung, a dead stick with a bark off. She is squirting on us both.

She has had her hand on you. Well, she has defiled me. Your leaves are dull, thick, and hairy. Every hair on my body will hold you off from me. You are a dung-cake, bird-lime on a fence-rail. I love you, straight, yellow finger of God, pointing to her. Lyer, broken weed, done-cake, you have. I am a cricket waving at a-a-old.

antennae, and you are high, gray and straight. Ha! Waiting. When I am alone, I am happy. The air is cool. The sky is flecked and splashed and wound with color. The crimson falloy of the sassafras leaves hang crowded before me and shoals on the heavy branches.

When I reach my doorstep, I am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children, and my heart sinks. I'm crushed. Are not my children as dear to me as falling leaves, or must one become stupid to grow older? It seems much as if sorrow had tripped up my heels. Let us see, let us see. What did I plan to say to her when it should happen to me,

as it has happened now? The hunter. In the flashes and black shadows of July, the days locked in each other's arms seemed still so that squirrels and colored birds go about at ease, over the branches and through the air. Where will a shoulder split or a forehead open and victory be? Nowhere, both sides grow older,

and you may be sure not one leaf will lift itself from the ground and become fast to a twig again. Arrival. And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom, feels the autumn dropping at silk and, linen leaves about her ankles, the tawdry-veined body emerges, twisted upon itself like a winter wind, to a friend concerning several ladies. You know there is not much that I desire.

A few chrysanthemums, half lie on the grass, yellow and brown and white, the talk of a few people, the trees, an expanse of dried leaves, perhaps, with ditches among them, but their comes between me and these things a letter, or even a book. Well placed, you understand, so that I am confused, twisted four ways, and left flat, unable to lift the food to my own mouth. Here's what they say, come, and come, and come, and if I do not go, I remain stale to myself, and if I go, I have watched the city from a distance at night, and wondered why I wrote no poem. Come, yes, the city is ablaze for you, and you stand and look at it, and they are right,

there is no good in the world except out of a woman, and certain women alone for certain things. But what if I arrive like a turtle with my house on my back, or a fish ogling from under water? It will not do. I must be steaming with love, colored like a flamingo. For what? To have legs in a silly head, and to smell pah like a flamingo that saws. its own feathers behind? Must I go home, filled with a bad poem? And they say, Who can answer these things till he has tried? Your eyes are half closed. You are a child.

Oh, a sweet one, ready to play, but I will make a man of you and will love on his shoulder. And in the marshes, the crickets run on the sunny dykes top and make burrows there. The water reflects the reeds, and the reeds move on their stalks and rattled dryly. youth and beauty. I bought a dishmop, having no daughter, for they had twisted fine ribbons of shining copper about white twine and made a tousled head of it, fastened it upon a turned-ash-stick, slender at the neck, straight, tall, when tied upright on the brass wall-bracket to be a light for me, and naked as a girl should seem to her father. The thinker. My wife's new pink slippers have gay pom-poms. There's not a spot or a stain on their satin toes or their sides. All night they lie together under her bed's

edge, shivering. I catch sight of them and smile in the morning. Later I watched them descending the stair, hurrying through the doors and round the table, moving stiffly with a shake of their gay pom-poms, and I talk to them, in my secret mind out of pure happiness. The Disputants Upon the table and the table and the their bowl and violent disarray of yellow sprays, green spikes of leaves, red-pointed petals, and curled heads of blue and white, among the litter of the forks and crumbs and plates. The flowers remain composed. Cooly their colloquy continues above the coffee and loud talk, grown frail as vaughterville,

the tulip bed. The May sun, whom all things imitate, that glue small leaves to the wooden tree, Shown from the sky through blue gauze clouds upon the ground, under the leafy trees where the suburban streets lay crossed with houses on each corner, tangled shadows had begun to join the roadway and the lawns, with excellent precision the tulip bed inside the iron fence, up reared its gaudy yellow, white and red, rimmed round with grass reposedly.

The birds. The world begins again. Not wholly insufflated, the blackbirds in the rain, Upon the dead branches of the living tree, Stuck fast to the low clouds, Notate the dawn, Their shrill cry sound, announcing appetite, And drop among the bending roses and the dripping grass.

The nightingales My shoes, as I lean unlacing them, Stand out upon flat, worsted flowers under my feet. Nimbly the shadows of my fingers play unlacing over shoes and flowers. Spouts. In this world of as fine a pair of breasts as ever I saw, the fountain in Madison Square spouts up of water, a white tree, that dies and lives as the rocking water in the basin turns from the stone rim back upon the jet, and rising there, reflectively drops down again. Blue flags. I stopped the car to let the children down, where the streets

and the sun at the marsh edge, and the reeds begin, and there are small houses facing the reeds, and the blue mist in the distance with grape-vine trellises, with grape clusters, smaller strawberries on the vines, and ditches running spring water that continue the gutters with willows over them. The reeds begin, like water at ashore, their pointed petals waving dark green and light, but blue flags are blossoming in the reeds, which the children pluck, chattering in the reeds, high over their heads, which they part with bare arms to appear with fists of flowers, till in the air there comes the smell of calumus, from wet gummy stalks. The widow's lament in springtime.

Sorrow is my own yard, where the new grass flames, as it has flamed often before, but not with a cold fire that closes round me this year. 35 years I lived with my husband. The plum tree is white today with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some bushes, yellow, and some red, but the grief in my heart is stronger than they, for though they were my joy formerly. Today I noticed them and turn away, forgetting. Today my son told me that in the meadows at the edge of the heavy woods,

in the distance he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers and sink into the marsh near them. Lighthearted William twirled his November moustaches and half-dressed, looked from the bedroom window upon the spring weather. Hey, yeah, sighed he gaily, leaning out to see up and down the street, where a heavy sunlight lay beyond some blue shadows. Into the room he drew his head again and laughed to himself quietly, twirling his green moustaches. Portrait of the author. The birches are mad with green points.

The woods edge is burning with their green. Burning. Seathing. No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold, cold, and separate. One by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips.

Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers. Hug! The birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken? Oh, my brother, you red-faced living man, ignorant, stupid, whose feet are upon the same dirt, that I touch and eat. We are alone in this terror, alone, face to face on this road, you and I, wrapped by this flame. Let the polished plows stay idle, their gloss already on the black soil. But that face of yours, answer me, I will clutch you, I will hug you, grip you, I will poke my face into your face and force you to see me. Take me in your arms, tell me the

commonest thing that is in your mind to say, say anything. I will understand you. It is the madness of the birch leaves opening, cold, one by one. My rooms will receive me, but my rooms are no longer sweet spaces where comfort is ready to wait on me with its crumbs. A darkness has brushed them. The mass of yellow tulips and the bowl is shrunken. Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed. I'm shaken. broken against a mite that splits comfort, blows apart my careful partitions, crushes my house, and leaves me, with shrinking heart and startled, empty eyes, peering out into a cold world. In the spring I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things. Your face, give me your face, Yang Kui Fei, your hands, your lips to drink,

give me your wrist to drink, I drag you, I'm drowned in you, you overwhelm me, drink, drink, Save me. The shadbush is in the edge of the clearing. The yards in a fury of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror, drink and lie forgetting the world. And coldly the birch leaves are opening, one by one. Coldly I observe them and wait for the end. And it ends. The lonely street. School is over. It is too hot to walk at ease. At ease in light frocks they walk. They walk. the streets to wild the time away. They've grown tall. They hold pink flames in the right hands, in white from head to foot, with side-long idle look and yellow floating stuff, black sash and stockings, touching their avid mouths with pink sugar on a stick, like a carnation each holds in her

hand. They mount the lonely street, the great figure. Among the rain and lights I saw the figure five in gold on a red fire truck moving with weight and urgency, tense, unheeded, to gong clings, siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city. End of Sour Grapes, Part 2 End of Sour Grapes by William Carlos Williams