Hammered Dulcimer Read online

  * * *

  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

  28

  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