C.K. Williams and the revealing glimpse

Big Frank is still looking for those poetic anecdotes. He has been reading C.K. Williams, who takes glimpses he has made and centers them on abstract qualities that they imbody: conscience, anger, resentment, greed, failure, fame, regret, self-knowledge, etc. etc. The scene, the event he relates embodies the abstraction of the title. Here's an example where he takes the act of forgetting notes while playing a piece of music and relates it to lost love. This is an interesting twist, because the first forgetting is one where what was forgotten one is trying to remember, but it's been temporarily replaced with false notes, while in the second the lost love that keeps coming to mind is equated with the "false notes" and the interval of waiting is for what existed before that love:

Vehicle: Forgetting

The way, playing an instrument, when you botch a passage you have to
stop before you can go on again --
there's a chunk of time you have to wait through, an interval to let the
false notes dissipate,
from consciousness of course, and from the muscles, but it seems also
from the room, the actual air,
the bad try has to leak off into eternity, the volumes of being scrubbed to
let the true resume . . .
So, having loved, and lost, lost everything, the other and the possibility
other and parts of self,
the heart rushes toward forgetfulness, but never gets there, continously
attains the opposite instead,
the senses tensed, attending, the conductors of the mind alert, waiting for
the waiting to subside:
when will tedious normality begin again, the old calm silences recur, the
creaking air subside?

And one more; this one on Petulance -

Love: Petulance

She keeps taking poses as they eat so that her cool glance goes off at
perpendiculars to him.
She seems to think she's hiding what she feels, that she looks merely
interested, sophisticated.
Sometimes she leans her head on her hand, sometimes with a single-
finger covers her lower lip.
He, too, will prop his temple on his fist, as though to make her believe
he's lost in thought.
Otherwise he simple chews, although the muscles of his jaws rise vio-
lently in iron ridges
Their gazes, when they have to go that way, pass blankly over one an-
other like offshore lights.
So young they are for this, to have arrived at this, both are suffering so
and neither understands,
although to understand wouldn't mean to find relief or overcome, that
this, too, is part of it.

You can listen to Williams read some of his poetry here, where he read at TED.