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.

For What is Left Us

– on When We Two Parted

I still have the fever you gave me: “I tried to be alone” you said, “so I could think of you with nothing to disturb me.  I sat in my son’s bedroom, in his little chair, in the dark.  The other rooms belonged to my husband.  When my son had gone to sleep I closed my eyes: I saw you again and again.”

I see you now, asleep at your son’s side.  In the end your fever was too much: my face grew brighter inside you, then vanished – and the fever passed to me.  Sleepless, I sit in my study, afraid that I shall always see you, afraid that I shall never see you.  I turn on the radio and hear a refrain; a woman sings: “Dors, pour l’amour qu’il nous reste.” “Sleep, for the love that is left us.”

I must be truly stricken to keep rehearsing these words and their simple music.  The rest of the song tells this story: a woman in bed bends over a sleeping man: after long years it is only in sleep, or in watching the other sleep, that they love.  Still I envy them for the time and the nights they have had: I never bent over your sleeping face – your face that keeps coming back.

If I could sleep, I could be free of this fever.  If you are asleep, perhaps something of me left in you will survive.  If I could sleep, I could still hold you in sleep.  I find myself repeating, again and again, for myself, still awake, and for you, at last able to sleep, “Sleep, for the love that is left us”.

WE

The Bedroom Mirror

– on mirrors

Its glass and metal, flecked and tarnished, hold
my privileged memories; its cloudy surface
veils whatever was uncouth and raw.
Tonight, inside its depths, I see white faces
soften as they rise in passion; spasms
melt into a graceful dance; arms flung
at random reappear in sacred gestures –
of those who lived by love, who lived with me,
who still must live somewhere, somehow, but not
as they once were, not as they still remain
here in this mirror, here in my brightening gaze.

WE

Author Biography

William Ellis received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities at Vanier College in Montreal.  He is currently the Senior Foreign Expert of the English department at Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan. There, he offers 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 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 now, Unshod Quills.