Thursday Poem

Blame

Where no question possibly remains—someone crying, someone dead
…………… —blame asks: whose fault?
It’s the counterpart, the day-to-day, the real life, of those higher faculties
…………… we posit,
logic, reason, the inductions and deductions we yearningly trace the lines
…………… of with our finger.
It also has to do with nothing but itself, a tendency, a habit, like smoking
…………… or depression:
the unaccountable life quirks forecast in neither the sour milk nor the
…………… parent’s roaring bead.
Relationship’s theodicy: as the ever-generous deity leaves the difficult
…………… door of faith ajar
in a gesture of just-fathomable irony, so our beloved other, in the pain
…………… of partial mutuality,
moves us with its querulous “Look what you made me do!” towards the
…………… first glimpse of terrible self.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Noonday Press, 1994