Thank you to Chrissy Williams for contributing the stunning opening of her poetic response to James Schuyler’s ‘Hymn to Life’, in celebration of his anniversary last November.
from Canticle
‘Is it for miracles we live?’ – James Schuyler
I lay my ear to the cold ground, margarita lime
salting my lips, and listen to the earth for breath,
for any plausible signs of life inside. I curl up
on the unlit path, failures crashing over me
in dizzy silence. The world spins worse now
that I have stopped moving through it. Snow
would not bring peace, would not pretend
that waste is beautiful, that the garbage fire
of my body ever gave heat to small hands,
hands that never once made a fortune teller,
scratched an arrow through an initialled heart,
who never died, because they never lived, who
could not be, again, again… Small stones
well themselves in my cheek, and the sky
goes about its cloudy starless business.
In Boston once I tipped my head back in the snow,
by The Downtown, in the wide thrall of experience,
felt my pulse, backbeat to an eight-track demo
recorded in a basement, dark and smelling of
cigarettes, the flannel sweat of youth, of lust and
not just the memory of lust, a whole way of being
that lives itself by accident, by the tap-tap of ash
onto fresh snow. If there are snowdrops here,
they are not visible. If there is a way to intuit
control, I have not found it. I was not prepared
for dereliction, for open flames in the white sky,
the aerial warfare of dreams and disappointments.
Chrissy Williams
Chrissy Williams is a poet, editor and comic book writer based in the UK. Her writing has been featured on BBC radio and television, and her full poetry collections are Bear (Bloodaxe, 2017) and Low (Bloodaxe, 2021). Volume 1 of her debut comic Golden Rage came out from Image Comics in 2023, and is described as “Battle Royale meets The Golden Girls“. She is editor of the online poetry journal Perverse. Her Substack page can be found here.
Lifesaving Poems 