A Word To The Whys (was Re: on this date: "hush! caution! echoland!")

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Henry Musikar wrote:
> 
> A-& wasn't there a great poem by Bill Carlos Williams listing a "dross" of
> items on his desk? I may have mentioned this back in the original cast (see
> SNL) days of the list. 

What is the poem, please?

The Joyce passage reminds me of a Dickens passage, of course
any passage reminds me of another and another and another
Kute Korrespondence. 




She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG
AND 
BOTTLE WAREHOUSE.  Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER
IN 
MARINE STORES.  In one part of the window was a picture of a
red 
paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks
of old 
rags.  In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT.  In
another, 
KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT.  In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT.  In
another, 
WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT.  In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S
WARDROBES 
BOUGHT.  Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be
sold 
there.  In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty 
bottles--blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and
soda-
water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I
am 
reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in
several 
little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood
and of 
being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation
of the 
law.  There were a great many ink bottles.  There was a
little 
tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door,
labelled 
"Law Books, all at 9d."  Some of the inscriptions I have
enumerated 
were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in
Kenge and 
Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received from
the 
firm.  Among them was one, in the same writing, having
nothing to 
do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a
respectable 
man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute
with 
neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook,
within.  
There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging
up.  A 
little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled
parchment 
scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers.  I could
have 
fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have
been 
hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to
doors 
of rooms or strong chests in lawyers' offices.  The litter
of rags 
tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden
scale, 
hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have
been 
counsellors' bands and gowns torn up.  One had only to
fancy, as 
Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking
in, that 
yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very
clean, 
were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

		Dickens, Bleak House