Desert Music by William Carlos Williams

If a poet can be both avuncular and murderous at the same time it's Williams.

I heard him read some of his early poems on an Lp years ago. The words were little jackknifes but his real time voice was thin and high-pitched. "This is just to say..." he squeaked.

Maybe he'd already had the stroke, I don't know.

The Williams poem I'm looking for now is "Desert Music", the section with the passage about the bridge between El Paso and Juarez, but it's not there.

I walked across that bridge last Christmas eve. When I told Bill Mohr he said, 'you know Williams wrote about walking across that bridge in "Desert Music?"

I hadn't known that Williams poem.

Disappointed that I can't find the poem, sure that the poem will meet all my needs should I be able to find it, knowing the poem exists but bewildered that I can't find it, that it doesn't seem to be in any of the Williams books on the shelves, I walk out of the bookstore.

I don't write poems anymore, I write prose. If something I write wants to call itself a poem, I call it a thing instead, respecting the difference between poetry and prose.

Prose can be something you feel you have to write, as it used to feel to me when I wrote poetry, but poetry's something you can't escape writing.