C.K. Williams
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
even knows now what about,
what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another's craws
like fishbones,
the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to
bed, and through the night,
feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touch-
ing, back to back,
the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep
us lifting, turning,
through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the arching dark,
the weary dark,
then, toward dawn, I can't help it, though justice won't I know be served,
I pull her to me,
and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive
embracing our entire lengths.
This isn't generally the kind of poem I'm drawn to, but there was something about it that I really liked. It made me recall one of my own poems about an argument and how the tension played out in a sleeping couple. For some reason, I had used music and sound images - staccatos, crescendos, violin strings, and the rattling annoyance of a radiator. This poet did a better job winding together these images to portray that jumbled, icky, roiling gut feeling of fighting then living with someone we love.
I initially found a lot of war-like language and imagery in "Peace," but on later readings, I saw references back to their dinner with words like fishbones, cadavers, dissected, and flayed. Also interesting how these words could describe dinner or the battlefield, which in this case, may be one and the same.
The repetition of "sleeping" helps the reader feel that endless pain of not being able to rest amidst the context of disagreement. He does that again by repeating the images of the darkness. How amazing is "the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain?" Love it. Then it's done, as these things often are, and they embrace. This is something I imagine we've all experienced and like artists do, the poet is able to capture it so accurately and beautifully, forcing us right back to those moments and those feelings.
I like this. Definitely one of those poems that describes something so common in relationships that it holds the reader in its relatability, whispering, “it’s not just you.”
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