A SÉANCE WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
— Eileen R. Tabios
“the derivation of the adjective venereal is from Venus!...I was stunned!”
—Dr. William Carlos Williams
Perhaps it was the mysterious Chinese
girl, “bedbug-like in character,” who
slipped syphilis to Van Gogh
in Antwerp. After the painter cut off
his ear, a psychologist speculated over
how the Dutch word for ear—lel—
sounds like the Dutch slang word for penis—
lul. When memory is dominated
by fear, have you noticed how it is not
fear but Terror? How to perceive the shift
of stars without feeling them fade or fall?
The psychologist continued his theory, thus
failing, like many of us, to break a pattern of speculation.
Van Gogh gave his ear to a prostitute because
her rumpled bed still stank from Gauguin’s visit.
Have you noticed how unresolved feelings
are often masochistic? I admit relief at discovering
the pattern of longing fuels my poetry:
“Lucy, unrequited love is still a form of life?”
After his syphilis-infected, long-haired Polynesian
girls who had yet to birth memories of
a man’s distraction over their breasts,
Gauguin ended his days decrying “colonial
oppression”—what forms of physical reality
are manifested by the concept of Irony? Have you
noticed how many questions may be answered
with one word: Everything? Michelangelo
possessed incomparable draftsmanship
except for breasts. This flaw seems inexplicable
for a sculptor weaned by a wet-nurse
both daughter and wife of stone masons.
Have you noticed the seemingly random manner
that attaches a certain weight to a certain matter—
what is the significance of Michelangelo
spending hours on his back painting the Sistine
Chapel for the syphilitic Pope Julius II?
Does the importance occur through the form of the
question? Should I rephrase the question as follows:
what is the significance of Michelangelo spending
hours on his back servicing a syphilitic Christian?
How to feel the Milky Way expand because, simply,
upon my waist you once placed your hand? Now,
I wish to interrupt this poem’s flow for rupture, too,
is part of rapture; my digression here is to reveal:
horsehairs placed in a barnyard’s water trough
will turn to wriggling eels by morning. Oh, (do not laugh!)
I promise you the truth of that statement though claiming
to know Truth is “a huge responsibility.” Is this not
why Da Vinci dissected criminals who died with hard-ons
to demonstrate that erections are caused by blood
suffusing the organ, rather than the common belief
of his time that the penis is inflated by the retention
of wind? Have you noticed how scientists must
become radical if they wish to pursue ecstasy?
In my time, women have written tomes
on the inadvisability of men thinking with—
well, you know. Da Vinci’s perspective on the penis
originates from a different angle: men are wrong
to cover the penis whose separate intelligence—
that it rise or not according only to its will—warrants
the display of the penis “with much adornment.”
How may a penis be decorated? (Is redefining “over-the-top”
inevitable?) Perhaps it can be painted like a comet’s tail—
that burst of bliss before falling to gravity’s nest? No,
that simile was too obvious; let us proceed to Cellini
whose concern for his legacy included the desire
for history to acknowledge his repute as a lover. I raise,
so to speak, Cellini now to encourage the contagion
of compassion, such as warranting Cellini’s insecurities
with our interest. Once, Cellini offered a mistress
to Bacchiacca. Perhaps this truly was an act of generosity.
But have you noticed how there is no Platonic concept
for Generosity—how generosity is often motivated by mere co-
incidence? Would Cellini have offered his mistress
to Bacchiacca if she was not riddled with venereal
diseases and the two painters were not rivals? Have you
noticed how the concept of disease leaves
an invisible seam between the notions of
physical versus psychological? Our good doctor,
William Carlos Williams, remembers one Finnish
word taught by a family servant: Hamahakquivergo.
I raise this dissonance because, truth to tell,
I am wondering if I have written all these words
so far only to manifest the one Finnish word
Dr. Williams knows: Hamahakquivergo means Cobweb.
Would it be awful to have spent years writing a poem only
to discover it is over a cobweb? I intended to write on
the tangled skeins of transmissions from sexual acts. (I in-
tended to pluck from the narrative of Nigel Cawthorne’s
amusing and amused book, SEX LIVES of the GREAT
ARTISTS.) But, haven’t we all noticed by now that history
may be is a circular matter rather than a linear progression?
Cobweb. Hamahakquivergo. Well, let’s clear the throat
and continue: I like what I hear about Titian as a lover
for he seemed kind. Have we all not been children once?
Why is Kindness such an underrated virtue? The wise
Titian did not discriminate between his daughters,
giving the illegitimate Emilia the same dowry
of 700 ducats he gave his legitimate daughter Lavinia.
Still, I admire Titian mostly for how he painted all
his nudes with their eyes open. .Have you ever made love
from beneath a blindfold? Behind the blindfold,
“desire stops time.” Trust me: try. Have you ever fucked
someone blindfolded? The diction is deliberate, you see—
when one half of a couple is blindfolded, one is a lover
while the other is a canvas, page, smoke… Have you ever
noticed: when a portrait’s subject stares back
the art object is dematerialized—the painting
transcends the surface of brushstrokes, the edge of canvas?
Truly, I like Titian and what he teaches about feminism
(and even 20th century post-modernism). But I am unsure
if I like the father of William Carlos Williams. Shortly after
his father died, the poet dreamt him walking out of a building.
“Pop! So you’re not dead!” Dr. Williams cried. His father
only looked up (squinting?) from some business letters clutched
in his hand to comment severely, “You know all that poetry
you’re writing…Well, it’s no good.” After that, Dr. Williams
said, he never dreamt of his father again. How to
perceive with tenderness, as Jose Garcia Villa once suggested?
How to see without the shade from lifting a palm over
one’s red-rimmed eyes? What is the difference between
a happily-married poet—like “I” now standing before you—
writing about adultery versus Rembrandt who was unable
to paint his second wife as a courtesan? (Is this a failure?)
Have you noticed how difficult it is to be lyrical
when one is attempting a joke? I have been trying,
you see, to insert moments of resonance in this poem
and notice now how fragile the words stand against
bawdy events I must raise as I discuss sex:
is it possible for the words “fucking” or “penis”
to generate the volta of Li-Young Lee’s favorite haiku:
Such a moon:
The thief stops in the night
to sing
What does it mean about me that as I write in the world
through this haiku, I mostly notice how its three lines disturb
the two-line form of the couplet? Have you noticed
how often we become our own worst enemies?
This time, I return to the subject of “sex” out of
a despairing resignation that I have lost so many words
and yet mustered no “significant” insight. I feel
my failure at creating the Poem versus lines etching
their aftermath on my wrinkled but welcoming brow. So, what
shall we make of Goya who painted The Nude Maja at a time
when nudes were forbidden by The Inquisition?
With some consolation, I am pleased to sense a feeling of
fortitude welling up as I offer that Goya manifested political
courage: “significant” breasts and a healthy crop of
pubic hair! Please share my joy over artists becoming
political through form versus content! But how to live
with other forms of knowledge? Such as your existence
within the city in which I measure each street—each
individual brick of stone, each slab of concrete, each inch
of tar—by their probability of receiving your light-brimmed steps
a few inches from where I may stand as a salt statue
frozen in unrequited longing? It has been so long since
I have entered a church. It has been so long since
I experienced the feeling of “walking upon a cloud”—
a phrase William Carlos Williams defines as the “calm”
that overcame him upon hearing the minister bestow
a benediction: “And may the peace of God which passeth
all understanding be and abide with you now
and forever more. Amen.” Inevitably, I come to
address Rodin. Of course The Thinker was thinking
of sex. One countess who posed for Rodin claimed
shock at his drawings of a woman “so shameless
as to take her melancholy pleasure in front of him.”
I am surprised the countess did not learn to name
a spade “space” by calling masturbation “masturbation.”
After all, this is the same woman who found it
“totally natural” that Rodin would fall on his knees
before her, take her by the feet and spread her legs.
Is a spade a “spade”? Do things become only
what they are named? Nor do I understand why
Delacroix is considered as great a diarist
as he was a painter. Once, he described a sexual
bout as “risk(ing) syphilis.” I would rather have
read Delacroix explain his decision for exposure—
did she have lovely eyes, or gave “good mouth”?
Or must I chide myself for this premature conclusion:
I have not read directly from Delacroix’s diary, only Caw-
thorne’s reference to it. I should know better than
to mistake the reproduction for what it copies. Have you
noticed the difficulty of maintaining lucidity, as if
our natural predisposition is to hide knowledge
from ourselves? Why must knowledge hurt
rather than simply offer itself like a Jackson Pollock
drip painting or the night sky where shifts, ruptures
aborted directions and, always, the riot of feeling
comprise a beauty of harmony? How to know that teal velvet
on pink tar is a painting, not the dream where I once
saw white velvet against black tar? How to know to avoid
penthouse windows because, once, I dreamed I possess
the whitest of wings? [insert caesura] Should I rise
from my writing chair to boil an egg so that I can return to
this poem with “the new mind” Dr. Williams recommends for
creating The Poem (I first typed, “Pow-em”)? Was it Rimbaud
who said the bears are dancing but what we had wanted
to do was to move the stars to pity? Still, Rimbaud had it
over me—I have moved only one thing (in self-conscious bathos)
and that thing is my belly to the chocolate cake whose siren
song within the refrigerator is drowning out my Muse, even though
it is Eros. Well, don’t sniff—cake was a good enough subject
for Wayne Thiebaud. [insert pause] It occurs to me: I know nothing
about Thiebaud’s sex life. But I can say about Renoir
that he loved the girls from Les Halles for letting
their breasts sing soprano above their bodices.
I can say that Cezanne painted still lives for
he feared naked women against whom,
he uttered, “One has to be on the defensive”!
Or that Seurat’s mistress who bore him a son
was unknown even to his most intimate friends
until after his death. I share her name proudly
with you: Madeleine Knobloch. For I would like
to be a poet’s secret mistress, but don’t tell that
to my husband because my beloved husband is not
a poet. This sidesteps the question of whether
a wife can be her husband’s secret mistress—
I would address this issue but my wrinkled brain
is screaming at the top of its metaphorical lungs: STOP
THIS POEM NOW! Perverse thing that I am—
otherwise I would not be a poet?—I continue:
Many men have informed me but only Degas
has showed me the great joy of glimpsing
a beautiful woman through an open doorway
taking a bath. Have you noticed how swiftly a sideway
glance transforms a subject in a way intent looking
would not have allowed? Is there a spectrum
to sight as there exists for light? Would the
position of crimson remain at the edge of vision?
I want to see as William Carlos Williams did
when he felt a dim garden, long neglected, by looking
at the crumbling bricks on a high wall. This is the same
man who once fell in love with the corpse
of a young negress—a “high yaller,” Dr. Williams
called her—lying stripped on the dissecting table.
I raise my head now to ask: have I mentioned yet
Ezra Pound? For I am not a modest enough poet,
you see, to write such a long long poem without
mentioning Pound. I shall say about Pound:
he used to pain the doctor by asking him to listen
to his poems. Dr. Williams recalls, Pound’s voice
would trail off in the final lines of his lyric
until the good doctor would explode: “Unless I
can hear the lines how can you expect me
to have an opinion of them. What do you think
I am, an apteryx?” Apteryx—great for Scrabble,
don’t you think? It is spelled, A-P-T-E-R-Y-X. Does
anyone here know what it means? I shall tell you—
I looked it up in THE AMERICAN HERITAGE
DICTIONARY which defines it as, “The kiwi.” Well,
no doubt that elucidates. By the way, it never fails,
does it?—this neat gimmick to insert a question
within the poem that, were I to read it out loud
to an audience, would allow me to form a sense
of intimacy not otherwise possible by me simply reading
and you simply listening? Are we feeling intimate yet?
Thus, shall we turn our attention back to sex?
The womanizing Gainsborough married a Duke’s daughter
for her money, not her beauty. Later, his youngest
daughter Margaret would die at the age of nineteen
from syphilis inherited from her father who often
signed off from his letters: “Yours up to the hilt.”
Where is it written that transcendence must be
difficult? How to behave like an angel when rapture,
as Lucifer knew, occurs through the fall? Heal me,
I plead with William Carlos Williams. The good doctor
responds with this tale: once, Ezra Pound played
the piano, letting fly with everything—Liszt, Chopin,
anyone you can name. But, the good doctor recalls,
“Everything resulted except music.” Why must there
be limitations to extreme emotions? Have you noticed
the pathos in that constraint? When I consider
pathos, I also think of John Ruskin who discovered
on his wedding night that, unlike marble statues,
women have pubic hair. To that discovery, he could
not rise to the occasion. Eric Gill, on the other hand,
considered the pubic hair a matter of philosophical
research—nevertheless, this is a pale tidbit compared
to Gill’s fascination with the sexual organs of animals,
such as peering through a microscope to compare
a cow’s semen to his own. Gill expanded the scope
of defining “voyeurism” as well as the issue of scale
often raised about the penis—and it occurs to me again
how hard it is to avoid that word “penis” which is
unfortunate since “penis” resonates as flaccidly
as “Ezra Pound” or “anus.” When I wish to soar from
the surface of words, I do not think of “Ezra Pound,”
“penis,” or “anus.” I think of azure, kimono, apricot,
adobe, Angkor Wat, magenta, anvil, silver moth…
How to taste black pepper exploding in the mouth
when today’s lunch is a sandwich of mashed potatoes
encased between two slices of white bread?
I taste pepper when I consider Toulouse-Lautrec’s
images of whores clad only in thigh-high black stockings.
My mouth explodes when I consider this dwarf painter’s
definition of paradise: a world of “female odours
and nerve-endings.” I have dreamt of Toulouse-
Lautrec dying in my arms, reeking from the alcohol
he drank to forget that he was “martyr(ed) to the Big S”—
once, Degas observed, Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings even
stunk of syphilis. Once, William Carlos Williams undressed
a big lump of a man in dirty overalls who had fallen twenty
feet while lugging stones in a red wheelbarrow. The nurses
shrieked when they cut away his bloody workclothes
to discover a woman’s silk chemise with little ribbons
at his nipples, that his chest and legs where shaved,
that he wore panties and silk stockings. What
determines how we define our secrets? How to
receive and protect secrets without being corroded
by aftermaths of conspiracies? Always, always:
how to discern with compassion? Now, there is no
smooth way to effect this transition as Picasso
enters this poem, nay, penetrates this poem
with the subtlety of a gored young bull. Apparently,
Picasso lost his virginity to a young girl who served
wine in a bar below his studio in Barcelona. Laughter
is a great aphrodisiac and she made him laugh.
Picasso backed her up against a barrel and, in his
own words, “made a man of himself.” Later, Picasso
would add upon noting her thin body and red hair,
it had been like “screwing my father.” The possible
implications of that statement are as obvious
as the tentacles of an octopus entering one of his
Blue nudes. In his “Blue Period,” most of Picasso’s
nudes depict women with their legs spread. What
does it mean if Picasso painted in blue because
syphilis forced him to abstain from sex? Who was
thinking: the man or the throbbing organ that must
remain stimulated and inflamed while enmeshed
in venereal disease? What exactly did Picasso spread
to Modigliani who believed making love to Picasso’s
former lovers would imbue him with some of the
Catalan’s genius? Certainly, I admire the Modigliani
nude’s admirable capacity to shock the viewer
with depictions of sexually satisfied women. Still, I confess
I am mostly charmed by the circumstances of the painter’s birth—
Modigliani was born in a bed piled high with golden
chalices; his father had just gone bankrupt and an ancient
Roman law prevented the bailiffs from taking anything
from the bed of a woman in labour. Have you noticed how
the world so often conspires to exacerbate certain
pathologies, such as postpartum depression?
How to concoct medicines that cure versus trade
one disease for another? How to live life
open to its cornucopia of experience without
the need for lies? Someday, I would like to
stroll through a street without seeing its dimensions
the way Eluard did: as a wound that will not close.
Heal me, once more I plead with William Carlos
Williams who replies, “All right! I shall tell you
of my own bout with syphilis! She was a German
Baroness considered to be a protégé of Duchamp.
Because she loved my poems, she offered her
Buffalo-like body with the advice, “Good doctor:
what you need for greatness is to contract
my syphilis and so free your mind for serious
Art!” Giggling, I reply to Dr. Williams, “Its (de)merit,
notwithstanding the approach, has much precedent.”
My reply may be the only moment of understatement
in this poem, and so worth noting, don’t you think?
With that question I realize, I am not a minimalist
despite wishing to write only silence for your
contemplation. How to know when a poem is finished
when perhaps all that I am writing about now
is simply this one and only matter: scale,
that common concern of paintings and penises?
Does Dali’s fixation on clearing latrines possess
sufficient “significance” to include? Oh, I sigh
at the prospect of transcending Dali’s beloved
word “anus.’ This must be more difficult than
writing the poem between repeating the word, “penis.”
How to insert more “cures”—words effecting
the sublime: Chive, Jacqueline, ash, bride, lang-
uor, stirrup, liqueur, Thai, filter, absinthe, wing,
rose—rose, rose, rose, rose. What becomes
of the dreamer who never leaves the dream?
At age eighteen, Diego Rivera ate a woman
for the first time. I am clarifying by calling
his act “cannibalism” versus “cunnilungus.”
Rivera discovered a French fur dealer who improved
the pelts of his cats by feeding them other cats.
Rivera wondered whether this strategy would benefit
humans. Was it an act of foretelling Frida Kahlo’s plight
when Rivera bought fresh corpses from the city morgue?
The artist discovered he liked both legs and breast,
though was partial, too, to breaded ribs and brains
vinaigrette—as long, he notes, raising a finger,
as they were harvested from young girls. I consider
the effect of war on a father’s face. How, I firmly believe,
a parent should never live longer than a child. How
a child should never witness—should never
witness—events which beg whether they should be
poeticized. How to listen to me share the joys of
pirouetting on the dance floor of the Milky Way
without considering me crazy or, worst, “just being
a poet?” I am whispering to you that when I look
down on this planet we share, the globe flattens itself
into a plane to maximize my vision of its teeming life,
the glory of unceasing chaos. If I do not shade my eyes,
I am rewarded by seeing intuitive grids rise
allowing me to begin singing: ambergris, ion, applejack,
celadon, Guadalupe, Cherie, polyglot, prima facie,
cocoon, lime, ruminate, tango, boilerplate, swish, beaux,
Ganymede, discombobulate, swain, ventricle, mop,
benzene, tamarind, myna, thermometer, willow, magnolia:
magnolia, magnolia, magnolia, magnolia…
We are ending a serious hour. Dr. William Carlos
Williams removes his stethoscope to proclaim, “Eileen,
any worth-his-salt physician knows that no one is ever
cured.” I suppose this means I must keep singing—Magnolia:
magnolia, tendril, grenadine, opus, maharani, MacDowell,
serendipity, tendril, licorice, hecatomb, calyx, glint,
periwinkle: periwinkle, periwinkle, periwinkle, periwinkle…
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