* * *
title : The Hammered Dulcimer : Poems May Swenson Poetry Award Series
author : Williams, Lisa.
publisher : Utah State University Press
isbn10 | asin : 0874212499
print isbn13 : 9780874212495
ebook isbn13 : 9780585025964
language : English
subject American poetry.
publication date : 1998
lcc : PS3573.I449W5 1998eb
ddc : 811/.54
subject : American poetry.
Page iii
May Swenson
Poetry Award Series
The Hammered Dulcimer
poems by
Lisa Williams
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Logan, Utah 84322-7800
Page iv
Copyright © 1998 Lisa Williams
Foreword copyright © 1998 John Hollander
All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Typography by WolfPack
Cover design by Barbara Yale-Read.
Cover illustration is "Salterio Tedesco" from Bonnani's Gabinetto Armonica.
009998321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Lisa, 1966-
The hammered dulcimer: poems / by Lisa Williams.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87421-249-9
I. Title.
PS3573.1449754 H35 1998
811'.54ddc21
98-9094
CIP
Page v
for
Ruth C. Talley
1915-1993
Page vii
Contents
Foreword by John Hollander
xi
The Direction of Shadow
5
Sunday Morning
7
Interruption of Flight
9
Yellow Bird
11
What the Wind Said to the Girl Who Was Afraid
12
The Fall
13
The Tenderness
14
The Hammered Dulcimer
15
Complaint
17
Eve, After Eating
18
Man Walking
19
Black Horses
20
The Growth
21
Manners, 1977
22
A Spider
24
The Man by the River
25
Banquet
26
To Night
On the Nature of Beauty
29
Romantic Relief
31
Negation
32
Landscape
33
A Wind in Place
35
Crater
36
On a Worm Descending a Thread
38
A Story of Swans
40
God Put the Noose Around My Neck
43
The Grasshopper
45
The End of Spring
47
In the Abstract
49
Ambivalence
51
The Chant
52
A Forward Spring
54
Page viii
Rattlesnake
55
In the Valley
57
After a Line of Plato
58
Acknowledgments
62
About the Author
63
About the May Swenson Award
64
Page xi
Foreword
Lisa Williams poems often start out in song and end in epidstemology, but they frequently break out into a kind of humming in the course of walking their self-generated routes. They manifest a fine ear for not only the rhythms of verse in English but for those of the argument that makes them. She can deploy, as in the poem and the lovely "A Story of Swans," a delicately modulated unrhymed anapestic trimeter (which in less skilled hands might degenerate into damped jingle), or can, as frequently elsewhere, rightly speak in tercets framed in conventional short-lined free verse and make them resonate with her own "tone of meaning," as Frost put it.
They extend a line of powerfully and actively contemplative poetry that marks some of the finest American verse of the twentieth century. One hears in so many of the poems in The Hammered Dulcimer an original voice modulating a major wavelength generated by Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery; one sees in them the continuing emergence of parable from sensuous presence, of meaning from things and conditions and configurations in which it had been lurking. "A Forward Spring" is perhaps central as well as typical in this matter; with an almost Marianne Moore-like resolve, its conclusion acknowledges the lesson taught by the most basic of cyclical rhythms to the moral imaginationawakening, whether of spring or consciousnessbequeaths if not what Hart Crane called "an embassy," then certainly a project:
I saw it so clearly,
how the spring admitted winter
but didn't retract.
What they call the sublime
doesn't look away
but looks at, boldly examines
the obscure impediments
to what it wants; sees
itself, sees what lies ahead
of itself, and goes forth . . .
Page xii
This poet's realm is that of a guarded wonder in which questions can seem less problematic than answers, and in which the meditative process, the turning of a formulation over and over again, becomes ever more analogous to the breathing rhythms of life itself, on the one hand, and to the controlled and constructed rhythms and there are so many different sorts of rhythm thereof poetic formulation. Wallace Stevens remarked in one of his aphorisms (which I've always wanted to see as the first line of an Emily Dickinson quatrain) "there is no wing like meaning," and I would adduce it not only with respect to that fine poem, "In the Abstract," but to the whole of The Hammered Dulcimer (and is that instrument something of a southern, damselled, harmonium?) as well. It is most appropriate that Lisa Williams's work receive an award in the name of that profoundly original poet May Swenson, for this is not only a more-than-promising first book but introduces an original way of looking at the world, and of looking at that very looking itself. It is a pleasure to greet it.
John Hollander
Page 1
"Sing unto him a new song;
play skillfully with a loud noise. "
Page 5
The Direction of Shadow
At night, the arrows of our fortune
point up and point down.
Black and inelastic,
slanted but not like sunlight,
taut as a heron's foot
or a string about to break
are the arrows of the fortune
we do not create.
The arrows of our fortune
cannot be touched, except
when a hand interrupts
their soft black filaments
on the ground, and the skin's
color, brushed with absence,
suddenly dims
Magnificent
are the arrows of our fortune
when the shadows of huge trees,
slender, pillared, excellent,
form them. Like the doorway
of a new religion
&n
bsp; they open something
but what?
To the arrows of our fortune
something sometimes happens:
the force of the arrow
slings past its shadow
which drops
on the grass, on the ground,
heavy as a man.
What is left behind,
what flaps in the wind,
is not it at all
not the vibrant quiver,
Page 6
nor the impenetrable mark,
nor the piercing matter.
The man falls on the grass.
His shadow joins him.
The goal dissolves in space.
A force flies through the universe,
winged in flame.
It is a game
where nothing wins
and everything of course is lost.
Page 7
Sunday Morning
So this is beginning:
day entering the long field
voiced and plumed,
noise entering the mind's
accruement of dream.
It is always a struggle,
the constant waking
from inward pattern
to outward motion,
from sleep to distraction
and back again.
While around us, the sounds
of so much affluence,
details prickling the air,
a sensory cacophony
of things and more things
lifted out of despair,
the black rush of distance.
What does it matter
how true they are?
These are what we wait for,
this multiplicity
of throats and feathers,
a busy consciousness
landing on the rigid bushes
and windblown grasses,
cattails nodding in assent
as if they understood
the physical completely.
I sit on a porch
Page 8
looking out at the morning
and it feels like a precipice
between the known and the unknown.
It seems a miracle
that we are not always afraid,
our many thoughts crowding
the singular present,
an untidy flock
without tangible wings
in a tangible mist,
sweeping in from the cold
to shriek of vividness.
The mind would carry the world off
but where would it land?
The real is landlord here,
you can smell it in the wind
although, if the dew is to be believed,
this field is primed
and open, it is vulnerable
to the claws of possibility,
to the multicolored being
intertwined with rays of sun.
It will come over the mountain,
flying, flying,
while the two halves of the self
one the resting body,
the other the mind unable
to lie on the ground
stay on their precipice,
inextricable twins
that do not understand
what they have come to find
but willing to wait for something
partly sublime.
Page 9
Interruption of Flight
The woman with no feet sits on the porch.
Before her, on the new-mown lawn,
her son polishes his motorcycle
until its chrome facets gleam
under the sun, display a world
playing on surfaces, things shining along
and across, their parameters warped,
motions churning and strange. The tall trees
fringe space, fringe the blue
with its frills of white mist,
its patched lace. The old woman
watches over the humming engine
while her son revs it up,
dark roar in our ears full of wind.
The space around shapes
is of interest, the space between leaves
imprecise, planes of pale air notched
by the green, a geometry raised,
what might be an angle
interrupted by branches grown past
plain. The woman's legs jut out:
one longer, cut off below the knee,
the other lost mid-thigh. And above,
the air writhes with birds, the sky's alive
with flying into, flying through.
Robins, dark robins, and sparrows,
like strong priests, loop together
the light between edges,
gathering sense, making of the jaggedness
something defined only by feeling.
Or the crowd of the self's lifting off,
carrying an image it believes
is immense. Now the woman
with feet made of air, with no speech,
is being helped out of a car.
Page 10
(When did she disappear?)
''Lean forward. Lean forward," the son orders.
(I was watching the birds.)
"Push yourself out! Push yourself out!"
And the world above words, the real sky
trailed by robins, by two crows
and by fat pigeons scuttling
the attic, feathering the heart's box.
One particular tree across the street
from the woman with no feet
stands in front of me. In the tree's
knotted limb is a hole, and in that waits
an additional hunger
deepening. Sparrows dart
in and out of the hole in the limb
where the restless chicks wait
with black throats. The parents
are solicitous, swooping down
every few minutes. They will not stop
so much emptiness, or the young naked song,
song so sure of the spirit's
primacy, of the terrible wish.
"Good job. That makes it easier on everyone."
Now the brusque son has placed his mother
in a wheelchair, pushed her back to the porch
where she'll sit and observe
the sun's anger increase,
the mechanical fruit. And her feet made of air
have flown off with my heart
like the birds who are priests.
May we scatter in peace.
Page 11