The Nail

By C. K. Williams b. 1936

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,

the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:

that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.

Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath,

mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,

feels the way you do with your nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed;

the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ...

No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;

it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen,

something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;

as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,

a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand

it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,

drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.

C. K. Williams, “The Nail” from Repair. Copyright © 1999 by C. K. Williams. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Repair (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999)

Biography

Hailed by poet Paul Muldoon in the Times Literary Supplement as “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation,” C.K. Williams has created a highly respected body of work, including several collections of original poems, volumes of translations, a book of criticism and a memoir. Williams is especially known as an original stylist; his characteristic line is extraordinarily long, almost prose-like, and emphasizes . . .

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