Two Poems
Donald Mace Williams

Aboard an Austrian Train at Ninety-four

This is my first and surely last trip here.
The train slips eastward in Tyrolean silence
across the sweet toes of the poets’ Alps,
whose ranks once would have made my rib cage lift
in Keatsian surmise, as if this range
still had one unclimbed, unromanticized
summit or knife-edge. Yesterday I rode
three cable cars up to the scabs of snow
on a bare field that in my former Rockies
would surely have shown whortleberries, grass,
and yipping pikas. Or am I inventing,
remembering former remembering?
My unused memories are scarce these days.

How many miles ago was my first love,
which like a mountain range drew me across
sharp ridges, down scree slopes, into
new explorations, new bewilderments?
Twelve thousand miles a year times seventy,
all of them whispers now like this slick train.

We’ve come past Würgl, a village whose name
sounds like overindulgence but whose scenes
in this late summer are all peptic green,
cows lying in a pastoral repose
though some of the pastures are steep enough to be
ibex golf courses. All of them are mown,
I think, by elf greenskeepers in the night.
So this is love, too, and is truth, this beauty
that slithers by as fast as if my miles
remaining had become kilometers.
I won’t try changing their allegro back
to moderato. What I pass, let pass.
I tilt my seat back like a sloping field
and lie sustained and eased by so much green.

- - -

95 ÷ 1.88

If I had lived all these Earth years
on Mars, I would be only fifty
(one year there’s more than one year here’s).
Now wouldn’t that be astronifty!

One thing, if one among the flow
of astrocraft said, Want a ride
to Earth? I’d have to say, Thanks, no—
I might find I had long since died.

- - -

Donald’s notes: “I’m proud to say I was a newspaper writer and editor for nearly all my career. When I retired, in 1998, newspapers everywhere were fading and dying. I shake my head over most of the ones that have survived. They aren’t what they used to be.

“Though I was at home in newsrooms, I never felt quite fulfilled by my work. I wanted to write poems, and for that I needed, or thought I needed, time and leisure. One reason I lacked those was that I spent much time learning and practicing German Lieder and other art songs, for which I studied voice for many years with many teachers as I moved from job to job. So the perfect conditions for poetry didn’t arrive till I retired. Since then I have written not only poems but also two novels, two nonfiction prose books, an iambic translation of Beowulf, and metrical, often rhymed translations of a hundred German poems by the wonderful Rainer Maria Rilke. My third book of poems, Of Granddaughters and Mars, is due out in early August this year. I’m ninety-six and still writing poems now and then. They are always metrical and often rhymed, and it’s gratifying to know that there are a few good magazines, such as Well Met, that still use such poems. I’m a native Texan, now living in Austin.”

- - -

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Two Poems Donald Mace Williams

Two Poems
Donald Mace Williams