Wages of Compassion

The wages of compassion, the pages of that tree

Twisting endless sorrow

all out

raking along my gut,

Those lives I cannot mend,

Those sorrows,

The endless rage, the endless raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

That spins over

and on and on off

into the night

"The fury that Williams detects in the American character, then, is the fear of touch, most immediately. Ultimately, it is fear of 'the dangerous ground of pleasure.'" Diggory, T., William Carlos Williams and the ethics of painting, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991.