Poems on America and Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond.
Old America
The angel above the fountain had not yet descended
when the upstart, carved, brownstone facades
on the new uptown square had begun to decay.
My grandfather might have seen him pitched into place,
so clumsily genteel, Santayana would have smiled.
Gentility outgrown, he wears the stigmata now:
chipped wing, hollowed robes, broken nose,
eroded face and hands
kissed into being
by spray on stone.
With little left to guard, the boughs
that shaded him are gone:
a few leaves drift in the basin
or mold themselves to his sides…
transients, from a place still green,
leaving a lacework of stains
on fragile stone.
Now the upraised palm
that was meant to hold back time
yearns
for its bodiless perfection:
mottled fingers
weathered away –
and he, a fable
in this treeless square.
Faraway
(Ann Arbor, 1968)
Often he used to wonder, after a sleepless night,
why he should gaze down from the attic window
watching the sun burn the mist from October streets.
He knew that the contours of the small city
would never emerge as he dreamed ‑
although the dream shifted from morning to morning:
A winding street on a small hill, pale, stuccoed facades
arching over rough colonnades,
dark women leaning from darker windows,
casements pushed open, refracting the light …
A long shady boulevard lined with clipped trees
and clumps of round tables with neat checkered cloths,
a couple embracing, old men playing chess,
an accordion’s whine floating over slate roofs …
These never were his, but only, each morning,
the grid of straight streets in his own wooden town.
*
But those streets were kind to him, hiding their lines
with a ragged flourish as veils of leaves
cast a mottled aureole of yellow and red
over drowsing cars and peeling front porches
where slat swings hung from creaking chains,
and the tinkle of wind‑chimes climbed
into the sparrows’ cries, into the beat of their wings,
and even the year’s threadbare fashion had glamour:
unbound hair floating over bare shoulders,
ripple of cotton, swish of tanned legs ‑
he was not clever, but still he looked,
and sees these things now,
and sees these things now…
Author Biography
William Ellis received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities at Vanier College in Montreal. He has retired after seven years as the Senior Foreign Expert of the English department at Sichuan University. There, he offered courses in Western Intellectual History, Art History, European Literature, and Canadian Studies. He was awarded the Sichuan Province Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. He is now backpacking around the world for a year with his wife, Denise (Chen Yu). He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. His poetry has been published in Mala, Chengdu Grooves, and Unshod Quills. Contact info: elliswa@hotmail.com.
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