My answer is very simple, fast and speedy—C. K. Williams, “The Singing.”
The best poem I ever read. It truly always zooms through my mind, and I see him—Big.
—Patrice Nganang
The Singing
I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon
under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with
their burgeoning forth
When a young man turned in from a corner singing no it was more of
a cadenced shouting
Most of which I couldn’t catch I thought because the young man was
black speaking black
It didn’t matter I could tell he was making his song up which pleased
me he was nice-looking
Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself
hence his lyrical flowing over
We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost
beside him and “Big”
He shouted-sang “Big” and I thought how droll to have my height
incorporated in his song
So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked
in fact pointedly away
And his song changed “I’m not a nice person” he chanted “I’m not
I’m not a nice person”
No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat but he did want
to be certain I knew
That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord
between us I should forget it
That’s all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to
me again he arrived
Where he was going a house where a girl in braids waited for him on
the porch that was all
No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions
were left where they were
It occurred to me to sing back “I’m not a nice person either” but I
couldn’t come up with a tune
Besides I wouldn’t have meant it nor he have believed it both of us
knew just where we were
In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to
which we were condemned
Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something
is watching and listening
Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor
heard no one was there
C. K. Williams was born in Newark in 1936. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Repair. Some other titles include Tar, The Vigil, and Flesh and Blood. He teaches at Princeton.
Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel Temps de chien received the Prix Littéraire Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire. He is also the author of La Joie de vivre and L’Invention d’un beau regard. His novel, Mount Pleasant, was published by FSG this year. He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University.
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