Woman Reading to the Sea
THE BARNARD WOMEN POETS PRIZE
Edited by Saskia Hamilton
2003 Figment Rebecca Wolff Chosen by Eavan Boland and Claudia Rankine
2004 The Return Message Tessa Rumsey Chosen by Jorie Graham
2005 Orient Point Julie Sheehan Chosen by Linda Gregg
2006 Dance Dance Revolution Cathy Park Hong Chosen by Adrienne Rich
2007 Woman Reading to the Sea Lisa Williams Chosen by Joyce Carol Oates
Barnard Women Poets Prize Citation
by Joyce Carol Oates
Woman Reading to the Sea contains poems of arresting intelligence, precision, and beauty. In wonderfully crafted language, with the startling subtlety of certain of Emily Dickinson’s poems, Lisa Williams takes us into eerily imagined worlds—the interior of a jellyfish, and the interior of a glacier; she beguiles us with the most seductive of poetic possibilities—that we might be absorbed into the consciousness of the beautiful and inarticulate world of nature, for instance—only to draw back in rebuke: “But this would be a lie.” (“Grackles,” p. 71). Williams’s subject is the “tune without a mind” of the world beyond the human, and our yearning to enter it: “Is it a thing we build outside ourselves / that gives us so much purpose?” (“Field,” p. 70).
The consolations of art, if not transcendence, are examined in a sequence of wonderfully evocative, candidly observant poems about Italian churches and their efforts of “restoration” Williams brings to this familiar genre a freshness and modesty that are warmly engaging. This slender volume constitutes a journey of sorts, a pilgrimage “out” that returns the questing poet, imagined as a companion “you,” to her own life. Lisa Williams is a poet of lyric gifts blessed with a luminous intelligence and wit.
ALSO BY LISA WILLIAMS
The Hammered Dulcimer
Woman Reading to the Sea
POEMS
Lisa Williams
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York• London
Copyright © 2008 by Lisa Williams
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Lisa, 1966–
Woman reading to the sea: poems / Lisa Williams.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06845-0
I. Title.
PS3573.I449754W66 2008
811'.54—dc22 2007040487
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
for
my mother
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications in which these poems (or earlier versions) first appeared:
Alabama Literary Review: “Midas’ Pause,” “Laurel,” “Woman in Front of Firelight,” “Death and Transfiguration of a Star,” “Jellyfish,” “At the Church of Santa Prassede,” “Restoration”
Bat City Review: “A Waterfall”
The Cincinnati Review: “Suggestive Grove,” “The Climb”
Image: “At the Church of San Crisogono,” “At the Church of Santa Maria Novella”
Literary Imagination: “Dark Ages”
Measure: “Leaving Saint Peter’s Basilica”
Michigan Quarterly Review: “The Kingfisher”
The New Republic: “Chimes”
Ninth Letter: “Belltower,” “Evening at the Dix”
Quadrant (Australia): “Erratics,” “The Fish,” “The Glass Sponge,” “Geometry,” “Another Sea Scene,” “Io”
Raritan: “A Cove,” “Shell,” “Farthest Flame”
Salmagundi: “Snow Covering Leaves of a Magnolia,” “Second Song,” “Safe Swimming”
Southeast Review: “Anatomy of a Skylark,” “Hadean Time,” “Helioseismology”
The Southern Review: “Gullet,” “Intoxication at Carmel-by-the Sea”
Southwest Review: “The Iceberg,” “Field.” “The Iceberg” won the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award for the best poem published in its pages in 2002.
Verse Daily: “Grackles”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “Woman Reading to the Sea,” “On Not Using the Word ‘Cunt’ in a Poem”
West Branch: “Grackles”
“Anatomy of a Skylark,” “Chimes,” and “Disobedience” were set to music by composer Steven Burke for Songs from Bass Garden, a song cycle for soprano and chamber orchestra performed by Susan Narucki and the Norfolk Chamber Orchestra at the 2005 Yale Summer Festival of Music.
I would like to thank the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the John Guare Rome Prize Fellowship, which enabled me to write many of these poems. Special thanks as well to John Hollander, Les Murray, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Steven Burke, Saskia Hamilton, Jill Bialosky, Joyce Carol Oates, my students and colleagues at Centre College, and especially my husband, Philip White.
CONTENTS
1
Gullet
Erratics
Woman Reading to the Sea
On Not Using the Word “Cunt” in a Poem
Snow Covering Leaves of a Magnolia
Eurydice
Midas’ Pause
Laurel
Suggestive Grove
Woman in Front of Firelight
Intoxication at Carmel-by-the-Sea
Horizontally, I Moved
2 (Hadean Time)
Hadean Time
Dark Ages
Farthest Flame
The Iceberg
Death and Transfiguration of a Star
The Fish
Jellyfish
Anatomy of a Skylark
The Glass Sponge
A Waterfall
The Kingfisher
Evening at the Dix
Field
Grackles
Chimes
Shell
3 (Restoration)
Leaving Saint Peter’s Basilica
At the Church of Santa Prassede
At the Church of Santa Maria Novella
At the Church of San Crisogono
At the Church of San Pietro a Maella
At the Church of San Clemente
At the Church of Santa Cecilia
Restoration
4
Maenads
Belltower
Io
Hades
Disobedience
Rapture’s Lack
Geometry
The Goddess Stopped
Second Song
Safe Swimming
Helioseismology
The Climb
A Cove
Notes
Woman Reading to the Sea
1
With snow for flesh, with ice for heart,
I sit on high, an unguessed sphinx
begrudging acts that alter forms;
I never laugh—and never weep.
—Charles Baudelaire, “Beauty” (translated by Richard Howard)
Gullet
Gnarled vision: a dark fist
rooting among the branches for ripe berries,
like a body of black starlings whose gold beaks
break and split into a clatter of knives
in neighborhood air.
I hear them interrupt the hour.
Wings, spiked feet, and oval bodies
slice through
dogwoods’ thin, scarred boughs
as they leave and light,
the rose-tipped, drooped, decrepit leaves
shuddering—.
The feathers on their backs
spell tapestries of birthing stars,
a cosmos carried.
It is no longer solid, the thing
that would be grabbed and preyed upon,
the thing imagined.
It loses color, becomes
something other than what they saw,
since what they see they take.
Sporadic flare of yellow mouths—
this other fruit
glanced among the color-weeping branches.
They’re after berries,
red-orange orbs, persimmon constellations
in the Keatsian nest.
Not spirit, but bulk, pure matter
whose greed disrupts and shatters
whatever’s picturesque.
It’s divide, land, shake, plumb, pluck
and swallow. A red orb flashes against a yellow
beak, black gap, before the entrance shuts.
I like to watch that part—
take satisfaction in the berry’s
roundness as it’s caught in pointed lines
before the bird’s head tips
to roll it back.
Each berry was a beauty
for some gullet to transform.
They are seekers flying over
fields I know, whose dry, sharp grasses
and weeds puncture the air
under their flight.
They are kin of my tongue, and thievish, and late.
Erratics
Boulders caught in slow-moving glaciers and carried along with the ice.
Around you, this cold mother tongue
trundles without acknowledging
your single presence, dredges chunks
of landscape, troughs great peaks to junk
and sediment, carries you along.
one of the ancient wholes gone wrong,
you’re just a speck. This pale, cold mother
buries you in her enclosure
of locomotion, her slow lunge
of transparent cavalry. You can’t loll
freely inside her, but are rolled
into the stampede of sameness. Dawns
wash blue and violet on her mass
in which frail, muted daylight drowns
through layers of muffling ice. You’re pulled
hundreds of miles, for centuries,
trapped in a blank cocoon that cracks
branch slowly in, and re-fuse later.
Her sound is a chorus of fractures. Glass
shatters to veins, black roots. Whole chambers
echo with splintering. When melting
comes it will be the liquid gasp
of adamant impressions loosed
and streaming from you as you catch
on land, too heavy to budge farther.
Headed toward open sea, as ice
will do when its voice becomes less groan,
more supple, that which must abandon,
at last she leaves you: upright and alone.
Woman Reading to the Sea
after a painting by Franco Mondini-Ruiz
There’s a certain freedom in the long blue slant
of its uncaring, in the wind that knocks
the surface onto rocks, and there’s a dent
made in that wind by the woman who recites
straight into it, pretending the waves might hear
or that some larger being that is sea
or seeing hangs there listening, when sea air’s
so clearly full of its own gusts and grunts,
inanimate uprisings. In the line
of no one’s sight, her voice lost in the spray,
she feels a chilling freedom: how the foam
edges the sheets of zigzag patterned water
while gulls’ shrill outbursts punctuate the sky
(one cloudy, sentimental phrase
or canvas brushed with amber, green, and rose).
What welcomes, and ignores, and doesn’t question?
Sheer emptiness. It’s like a husk
for her alone. It’s like a shell for absence.
Without an audience, she makes a noise
swallowed by waves and wind, just as
the waves themselves—or no, just like the drops
lost in the waves, which neither care nor keep
distinctions—sweep out a place
inside an amphitheatre she imagines
rising around her, with columns that crash
instantly, like the white foam that collides
and shreds its layered castles. Her words drift,
dissolve, and disappear. A crest
of words has surged and poured into the sea.
It doesn’t matter now what the lines say.
On Not Using the Word “Cunt” in a Poem
Certainly there’s pressure to perform
in such a way what doesn’t sound so stately
and isn’t safe: Let it be shorn,
the poem’s lush holiness. Let locks be trimmed.
Cut to the chase. How unchaste can you be?
Can I proffer a different kind of tongue,
one that licks nether regions? Can I start
offering words that aren’t courtly or cute
and don’t contain such blanket recanting
of words I use when I am in a wreck
or mad at somebody or being fucked
—those anti-canticles I chant when hurt,
the kind of words I punt when breaking glass
or bumping ceilings? Can I be curt,
not hunt for language so gosh-darned appealing
but pick what’s more intransigent
and less ornate? Or is that just a judgment
ignorance can make—that stealing
the spotlight, showing one can “rough it up”
is really more mere decorativeness,
like the performance of a burlesque romp
by someone who would rather keep her dress?
Is that all poems can do to snatch attention,
use such dim tents of tricks? Let’s nick
this baby in the bud: am I too mendicant
to fluid cadence? Do I serve lip
by thinking a poem is holy, not a hole
to thrust things in, for the very sake of thrusting?
Or do I suit myself for an audience
by shirking my naked voice, or the cliché
of what a woman’s naked utterance
would be, as if just honest women cussed?
Should I be someone who docks elegance
because it’s penal territory,
someone who takes the name of poetry
in vain—who kicks the ass of beauty?
I know we’re all voyeurs, but can’t
you come for me a different way this time
and listen, for one minute, to a poem
that’s not revealing crotch and pay attention?
Is it impossible for me to strut
my stuff without the madonna/whore
dichotomy? Without the flash of tit
-illation, would you give my poem a date?
Or must I count my kind of cunning out?
Snow Covering Leaves of a Magnolia
Perfection stills, admits nothing,
like these white grains cupped and blinding
in lilac light—.
What its object “feels,”
if feeling’s relevant,
is weight, the burden of surprise,
an iced admonishment
of months coming to fruit
on the vagrant summer’s dark green
lustrous skins.
Nostalgia’s excess
has been banished.
The new r
eign’s virgin syllables,
in papery increments,
whisper their descent:
This is what you must turn to.
This zeroed sensation.
This blow to sprawl.
Horizons frozen
by a yield of white.
Growth is not virtue.
So the body becomes a statue
in puritan dress.
Nothing to do but stand there
and bear it, revoked,
while perfection lands each earnest
inimical stroke.
Eurydice
Why was delight not afraid?
It meant inattention
or it meant new attention:
a fish scale, scintillant,
limning deep deaths
of color that formed an abyss…
A fish scale!
—Junk lit
in ambiguous channels
like symbolic gold leaf.
It meant a wrought
and petalled land,
the sky’s blue smoke
over fields of asters,
years turning their soil
into semaphores,
stamens, fibrils
more intricate as you lower
your face to their details
which nearly speak.
Delight had an afterward
unseen, a figure
left behind, a trick of furtherance:
it was partial
and whole-blind.
It carried a little cavity
like belief
which meandering could fill.
Midas’ Pause
I tried to ornament my life
with gold unfoldings, luteous curls
like antique horns and old illumined scrolls,
mosaics in an emperor’s bath, or temple
hearths where virgins guarded aureate fires,
those pyres Aeneas piled high for the dead.
I wanted brilliance spooling from my fingers
as brown sprigs burst to floral springs,
to leave gilt in the dust each time I turned
away, and glister venerable trails
like the sheen of an exotic snail
streaming across the underworld,
fine threads of my bestowal. The gods
would not be more admired than I