The Gift by C. K. Williams

I have found what pleases my friend’s chubby, rosy,

gloriously shining-eyed year-old daughter. She chirps, flirts with me, pulls herself up by my pants

leg, and her pleasure is that I lift her, high, by her thighs, over my head, and then that I let

her suddenly fall, plunge, plummet, down through my hands, to be, at the last instant, under

the arms, in mid-gasp, caught. She laughs when I do it, she giggles, roars; she is

flushed with it, glowing, elated, ecstatic. When I put her down, she whines, whimpers, claws at

my lap: Again, she is saying . . . Again: More. I pick up my glass, though, my friend and I chat, the

child keeps at me but I pay no mind. Once I would never have done that, released her like

that, not until, satisfied, sated, no need left, no “more,” nothing would have been left

for her but to fold sighing in my arms. Once it was crucial that I be able to think of myself as

unusually gifted with children. And, even discounting the effort I put in it all, the

premeditation, the scheming, I was. I’d studied what they would want--at this age to rise,

to fall, be tickled, caressed. Older, to be heeded, attended: I had stories, dreams,

ways to confide, take confidence back. But beyond that, children did love me, I think, and

beyond that, there seemed more. I could calm crying babies, even when they were

furious, shrieking, the mothers at wit’s end. I had rituals I’d devised, whisperings, clicks; soft,

blowy whistles, a song-voice. A certain firmness of hand, I remember I thought:

concentration, a deepening of the gaze. Maybe they’d be surprised to find me with them at all instead

of the mother or father, but, always, they’d stop, sometimes so abruptly, with

such drama, that even I would be taken aback. Tears, sometimes, would come to my eyes: I would be

flooded with thanks that I’d been endowed with this, or had resurrected it from some primitive source of grace I

imagined we’d bartered away. What else did I have then? Not very much: being alone most of

the time, retrospectively noble, but bitter back then, brutal, abrasive, corrosive--I was

wearing away with it like a tooth. And my sexual hunger, how a breast could destroy me,

or a haunch: not having the beautiful haunch. . . . And love, too, I suppose, yes, now and then, for a

girl, never for other men’s wives yet . . . Where did the children fit in, though, that odd want to

entrance and enchant, to give bliss? Did no one think I was mad? Didn’t I ever wonder myself if I

was using the children, whether needs or compulsions, at least sublimations,

were unaccounted for in my passion? No, never, more sense to ask if those vulnerable

creatures of the heart used me. The children were light--I thought they pertained to

my wish to be pure, a saint. I never conjoined them with anything else, not with the

loneliness or the vile desire, not with my rages nor the weary, nearly irrepressible

urges I’d feel to let go, to die. The children were light, or let intimations of light

through--they were the way to the soul: I wanted to think myself, too, a matrix of innocent

warmth instead of the sorrowing brute I was, stumbling out by myself into the moaning darkness again,

thrust again into that murderous prowl. From “Poems 1963-1983” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95). Wiliams, born in 1936, has published four volumes of poetry, of which the fourth, “Flesh and Blood,” won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at George Mason University in Virginia. 1988, C. K. Williams. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.