Hammered Dulcimer Read online

  this ring of silence in my heart

  or lift a hand to interrupt

  the evening that is closing down.

  I stay behind, I hesitate,

  as leaden as a lying bell.

  The sky is like an empty shell

  and inside that, small instruments,

  beyond all expectation, leap,

  as darkness falls, as darkness falls.

  Their sound is sharp. They reconnect

  the quiet land to distant stars

  and lift, in tiny increments,

  some figure out of deepest thought.

  When both our bodies wandered here

  and never thought to hesitate

  but did and meant, since they were near

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  those differences two souls can make,

  then evening held, and fear was old,

  and morning had a human shape.

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  A Forward Spring

  Today the cold came back

  a sudden estrangement.

  That first pale decision

  to reach as far as lushness can

  had just broken through:

  all the celebratory leaves

  explored by squirrels,

  the return of canopies

  instead of high naked trees,

  deer in new horns

  stepping over the folded

  carnage of winter storms,

  worms winding

  like thought through those layers

  where only a future had roots

  during periods of doubt,

  the mysterious wet dirt,

  and the sun's intelligence

  that separates clouds

  with rays of sheer will.

  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 . . .

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  Rattlesnake

  What I remember is a cabin

  deep in the woods,

  the pure cold air my lungs drank,

  and that the earth

  was unusually hard, packed tightly

  under a thin layer of leaves.

  We ate dinner, and I remember

  what a child would:

  mere flickers, bursts of laughter.

  Later, from a window

  I heard rustling, harsh words.

  You led me to the yard. A snake's head

  oozed onto the dirt.

  Its blank eyes glinted.

  One end and then the other

  of the body flexed and whipped

  in a twisting rhythm

  that dislodged leaves and stones.

  When the writhing stopped

  you grabbed the snake

  and carried it to the kitchen.

  After curving a knife along

  its quiet belly, you pulled back the skin.

  I felt if I looked long enough

  I could read what was sprawled there,

  tangled and glistening.

  Then you tugged the heart

  from its nest of arteries and veins

  and handed it, still beating, to me.

  It was firm and vivid red;

  cool, but the pulse sent heat

  into my palm. I walked outside

  to watch the heart pump

  in the eerie sheen of moonlight.

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  And that's what I have left:

  the warm, dull throbbing of a heart

  held carefully on my open hand

  before I let it fall.

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  In the Valley

  Let us walk in the valley.

  Let us walk with our hands

  opened wide in the valley.

  Let us gaze at the desert.

  Let us not turn to flame

  at the eye of the desert.

  Let us pass the green mountains

  and answer the bones

  as they gasp with the wind

  Are you last? Are you lone?

  Let us hear our own name,

  let us find a stone warmed

  by the sun in our valley.

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  After a Line of Plato

  I

  In the city that shall be perfect,

  in the city of intelligence

  where thinking reigns

  and desire is at rest

  and what happens happens

  because the self wills it

  to be so, you are reading.

  I am almost asleep.

  The sun slants

  on your belly, over your limbs.

  I am watching it find circumstance.

  I am wondering how fast, how fast,

  this abstract energy goes.

  Outside, children's shrieks

  mix with birdsong and men's saws

  and feet back and forth. I am trying

  to rise in this cavern of sound

  as if with a terrible weight.

  The sun swings around

  our flesh, armed and glorious,

  a procession of ages,

  a procession of myth.

  If it is true that the cliches follow us

  because they have something to say

  then this crow on a giant oak tree

  makes a very important point.

  It croaks a series of harsh notes:

  One, two, three.

  About our mortality, maybe.

  One, two, three.

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  Or the force of the mind

  when it lands on the tree of the body

  and believes it owns everything.

  One, two, three.

  When Satan entered the garden,

  he chose a bird

  as his initial enchantment, his primary matter,

  its black feathers flecked

  with iridescence,

  all the colors of the garden

  playing over its sheen.

  He found the highest tree

  to peruse his newfound paradise from

  and stayed there a very long time

  pondering what to begin.

  It must have been spring.

  The fruits of his provocation

  hanging down. The blunt sounds

  of animals in the shadows,

  fleshly things. A man and a woman

  asleep, her dreaming

  of difference.

  This is the place

  where what I am

  and what I would like to be

  opens its wings . . .

  Today is Saturday. The tuliptrees'

  pale yellow-greens

  bloom unfinished, the fringed palms

  of the maple unravel,

  tiny, red-veined. Pater says

  ''the seemingly new is old also"

  and "mere matter alone

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  is nothing." Our crow doesn't know this

  as he sends out his song

  to a distance that constantly

  takes it. He's the detail

  unable to see

  past its beak. But the devil in us

  knows how surely we reside

  at the periphery, how foolish

  is all speech.

  II

  And this is what the world is.

  Primarily music. Not meaning

  but action and form. Not meaning.

  In the city of perpetual motion,

  in the city that will be enough,

  the matter itself

  has arrived.

  It lands in the midst of our innocence.

  It lands with its own kind of innocence,

  a hard fact beneath it,

  the soft
air around.

  Both the body of stillness

  and the body of flight,

  poised on a branch

  no soul could reach,

  with the voice that is not prettiest,

  it will sing,

  all the colors of the garden

  playing over its wings,

  while the adequate, more than adequate

  promise hangs

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  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the editors of the following journals in whose pages some of these poems appeared: "Rattlesnake" in Crazyhorse; "The Growth" and "What the Wind Said to the Girl Who Was Afraid" in Virginia Quarterly Review; ''Eve, After Eating" and "The Fall" in Raritan. Thanks also to editors who published earlier work in the following journals: Cream City Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, Chattahoochee Review, Clockwatch Review.

  I am grateful to the following people, whose encouragement, inspiration, and support have contributed to the making of this book: Larissa Szporluk (the spirit is in the wheels), Neil Arditi, Cynthia Crane, Sydney Blair, John Hollander, William McDonough, Michael Braungart, and my familyespecially my mother, Cam Vaughan, a real hammered dulcimer player.

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  About the Author

  Lisa Williams was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1966. After receiving a B.A. degree from Belmont University in 1989, she was awarded an Elliston Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, where she graduated with an M.A. in Literature in 1992. In 1993, she was awarded a Henry Hoyns Fellowship at the University of Virginia, where she received an M.FA. in 1996. Other awards for her work include an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals, including Chattahoochee Review, Louisiana Literature, Raritan, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Currently, Lisa Williams works as a business writer in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Hammered Dulcimer is her first book of poems.