Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams
MASTERY
The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,
I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reach
casts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breach
this page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylon
risen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?
If I remember my own name, then I can ego
my way through this crowd of shadows
that cross the bridge of my back mid bow.
I slept in the Fifth House of Modernism,
beneath stars that offered no light—dust
full of fear, my own dead skin encrusting
room corners and my mind in a schism
between image and luck. When I awoke,
the empire rose in me and I was risen
from its dead letters to the letter, chiseled
by my own invisibility, this war between smoke
and reflection, between self versus self connivingin the longest hall of my fear to remain there.Many doors scraped open, their alabasterknobs ghost-turned while voices as convincingas a mother slipped out. I looked into one roomand found awhistling Confederately through the glass teeth andtell me how I grinned and hollered back a tune:
