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Williams Poems

poems from the author

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MarcusFelsman
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447 views3 pages

Williams Poems

poems from the author

Uploaded by

MarcusFelsman
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Life Story

BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.
You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course
there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,
and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?
Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

"Life Story" by Tennessee Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF


TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, copyright 1937, 1956, 1964, 2002 by The
University of the South

The Soft City

BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

I
Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur
turns in the soft dusk,
the lights of it blur,
the delicate spires are unequal
as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them...
And the soft air-breathers,
their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water
responding to some impalpably soft pressure,
turn with the city, too.
The petals of tenderness in them,
their tentative ways of feeling, not quite reaching out
but ever so gently half reaching out and withdrawing,
withdrawing to where their feminine star is withdrawing,
the planet that turns with them,
faithfully always and softly...
II
And if there is something which is not soft in the city,
such as a cry too hard for the soft mouth to hold,
God puts a soft stop to it.
Bending invisibly down, He breathes a narcosis
over the panicky face upturned to entreat Him:
a word as soft as morphine is the word that God uses,
placing His soft hand over the mouth of the cryer
before it has time to gather the force of a cry.
It is almost as if no cry had ever been thought of...
And, yes, over all,
soft canopy over soft canopy,
web over soft, soft web,
gauze hung over gauze,
the mysteries of the tall heaven,
the tall and very soft heaven,

are softest of all!

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