Woman Reading to the Sea Read online

  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

  Another Sea Scene

  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 stubborn elements,

  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