Listen to audio of Joyce Carol Oates reading this poem here.

Dear Jim,

I #fnally got your letter enclosing your letter enclocussing your letter which was so ompportant foe me, thannkuok yuon very much. In time this fainful bsiness will will soonfeul will soon be onert.Tnany anany goodness. If S lossiee eli wyyonor wy sinfsignature.

I hope I hope I make it.

Bill

The first snowfall brings chaos.
First the horizon disappears, then
you disappear. When

William Carlos Williams suffered his first stroke
he was 68 years old, in 1951. His second,
the following year. The man loved

our American speech. Vulgar & graceless
as oversized boots he loved it. The pimply-
faced girl he loved. Forms inside things gnarly

to the touch. Smokestacks, mustard weed.
The steely river filling with acid & sparrows
picking in the dirt, like Death. Yet

still just sparrows. Beauty of marigolds,
& fried oysters. Beauty of spiderwebs,
Breughel's hunters in the snow. Except

maybe what the poet saw & heard
was in his own head! Maybe in Rutherford,
N.J. there was nothing. Maybe

he was in despair, fierce lover
of women & adulterer & this morning waking to discover
someone has dressed him in an old man's underwear—

gunmetal-gray, woolen-itchy, soiled cuffs
at bony wrists & ankles & the crotch unsnapped.
Opens his mouth to curse