By Me Without My Importance
By Me Without My Importance
By Joshua Chalifour
Where a man of wet law
sped away, right past
was half virtue and
leaning into the world
who, until with a word sent
in one man's mind,
a woman averted the man's I
right to this house of—
Why, I looked up at them
by looking
at the nameless girl
of four,
belly-laughing a who-the-face way
on the balcony
(of the spectacle, I saw)
and of the nothing boy
of eight,
who smiled in a supreme way,
I saw
(over a leg of the North)
the rail for the road
But in the middle of the road
was an elderly bother
along with the look
to enjoy an I
For my forward went on,
passing car wheels, spinning
on a blue watchchain.
The Right of Way
By William Carlos Williams 1
1 William Carlos Williams, “The Right of Way,” in Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson, Spring and All (New York: New Directions, 1985).
In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world
but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by
virtue of the law--
I saw
an elderly man who
smiled and looked away
to the north past a house--
a woman in blue
who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up
into the man's half
averted face
and a boy of eight who was
looking at the middle of
the man's belly
at a watchchain--
The supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle
sped me by them
without a word--
Why bother where I went?
for I went spinning on the
four wheels of my car
along the wet road until
I saw a girl with one leg
over the rail of a balcony