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.