Woman Reading to the Sea

by Lisa Williams

  with each branch of my royalty,

  whatever I touch exploding—now—with value

  new to itself, no longer just itself,

  rare fingertips’ bequeathal! Could I guess

  embellishing the plain, my precious vice,

  would leave me starved for what is ordinary,

  would leave us ruined, whoever shared

  a meal with me, whoever I might hand

  a thing, or lay a palm on, kindly, warmly?

  I can make a surface glitter. But I can’t

  drink or eat. No ladle of river water,

  no crumb of bread or ripening autumn fig

  brushes my lips before it strikes like lead,

  each bruising gulp a new coin in the void

  of my stomach, a hoard of grandeur

  harder to bear each hour, undigested

  and contrary to flesh. I languish

  for the lack of what seems common: a tomato,

  a simple root from a clump of musky soil,

  my wife’s familiar breath. What worth is worth

  if it closes me from life? I lower myself

  to the floor and watch the awful beauty

  creep in circles radiating out

  from where I sit, making a sound

  of cracks and splits as it transfigures tiles

  like a fleet of molten serpents lashing

  from my still-lumpish flesh along

  the floor into the blooming garden

  where my wife bends now, clipping vines…

  I see her gesture slowly as she sees

  —too late—the alteration climb

  from soil to overtake her body’s standstill,

  a metamorphosis that kills

  as adders’ poison does. She can’t escape

  without ripping her leg from her own ankle,

  and so must freeze there, horrified,

  as it crawls to fossilize her flesh,

  her sex, her mother’s milk

  and then—slowly, at last—entraps

  the small pulse of her throat, stopping her breath,

  her mind that still beats tinnily in its cage

  till all thought’s wings are smothered…

  But I move too fast, imagining that which

  hasn’t happened yet. Why does what weighs

  in the hand and gleams before my sight

  turn into a tyrant? How I want

  to take one soiled and gardening hand

  of hers from the dirt and kiss it! She absorbs

  what light falls on her body, doesn’t glow

  as cold and as unfeeling as my opus.

  Laurel

  after Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne

  The man leaped lightly through the fields,

  an arm’s length from my heels. I felt my feet

  burning, lifting bits of wrenched grass—chunks

  of dirt, pebbles, root clumps—as I lunged past

  where I had been, each former green harbor

  abandoned. Air rasped in my ears,

  whirred through the bristling foliage

  that crowded my path, sent out spikes

  and appendages. Twigs and leaf edges

  scraped me, drew stuttering lines on my skin.

  Through the blurred, varying canopy

  I glimpsed a sky riven to pieces, slivers

  of its blue patina like a broken vase,

  the thing I’d looked up to, all its shapes

  wasted; soft, blowing forms—horns and sheep

  and goats, billows of noble cloth, bridal veils

  —marred by the dimming fringe

  overhead. Shadows and light climbed

  my skin as if witted, racing over

  flesh to some end—but what was it—

  complete blinding white, like a temple?

  Darkness of Persephone’s throne?

  Little bits of both flecked my path: broken

  poses, scattered fundaments.

  Each pound of my heels struck like needles.

  Each foot dribbled blood

  but I kept pushing, through one scrim

  of branches to another, arriving

  somewhere that was only on the way

  to more evasion. I ran toward me from his

  outstretching hands, a me that bloomed

  in the distance, as if my self were the goal

  all along. I heard him call:

  Apollo. He pounded and glowed

  behind me, his name flung through the narrow

  scope of our flights, the air filled

  with leafy ligatures and long, strangling vines.

  I follow. He drove me from groves

  calling “sister,” “sister,” “beloved”

  as he flattened the fields. I looked behind me

  to see the gold-spattered skin

  of a god, smell the fragrance of honey

  —too rich, too cloying, reminding me of bees,

  a swarm I witnessed when I was a girl:

  all momentum and hum

  and restless needlings: a thunderous colony

  of bodies: cacophonous wings.

  I had been sitting on a log, had moved away

  and then seen them: exactly in the place

  my body had been a few seconds before

  as if to inhabit the air still rich

  with my breath—as if my previous presence

  formed a portal, a sudden arch

  for arrival. It was like this with Apollo:

  each place I’d been was opening to him

  even as my steps fled, the air emptied of me

  ripe for his existence. Escape

  belonged to me, and he wanted that too.

  Apollo, the cloying smell:

  the pound and call: his want. I hoped

  the landscape would bury me,

  that I could slip into the background,

  as if into relief, the flat place

  around those outstanding ones, icons raised

  on white portals. Father, father, protect me…

  Then the bark gnarled up between our limbs.

  Then the hair he craved coiled to leaves.

  He supposed me a surface, like a river

  he could embark on, a fleet of waves,

  silvery and involving…reveries

  I hindered or interrupted, snapping fresh

  tendrils midstretch. Now we are caught

  like two stones. I wrench into branch,

  my nerves numbed. An umber rush

  floods my skull, and my mind

  dulls and hardens, entrenched

  with gold sap. Clenched, but freed.

  Dropped questions, dropped fluidities—

  The clefts in my hands splay to leaves. White

  roots from my toes pierce cold ground.

  No man will pry loose this body.

  No god will wrack what is mine.

  Suggestive Grove

  These trees strike me as musicians, bent

  toward one another’s notes: one leans

  to catch a strand of melody or the refrain

  strummed on a mandolin. One hunches

  vigilantly, displaying, with clenched silence,

  that he’ll be joining soon. One to the left

  gestures to the rest to urge them on,

  claps his hands and nods in duple time.

  I see their creviced faces, how they mark,

  without a word, the supple indications

  intimate to them, or linger, poised,

  as if this were about attentiveness

  instead of making noise. Maybe it is—

  just an intense abstraction, as they sway

  in unison, or crane to hear new strains

  begin, to understand what has begun

  so they themselves might enter. Something

  like faith encompasses them all,

  something like faith or piety. They can’t

  conceive of ending it. One’s shift

  o
r surge of merging notes belongs

  to each of them, was part of all their thoughts

  about the notes before they played a song.

  To improvise is contemplation’s voice.

  Woman in Front of Firelight

  after a painting by Franco Mondini-Ruiz

  This was a different light, but still familiar.

  She felt illumined and she felt afraid

  —serpents of color lashing through degrees

  of ambience, heat. She knew their streams would fade

  to ash, that their beauty would decompose,

  like a passion that blazed into display

  then dwindled, and there was a little sadness

  to this hard truth: she lived in a world

  where such lush burnishings arrayed

  only a moment before they smoldered.

  But now, enfolded in a pause

  of orange flamboyance, even though its cause

  was material, finite (unlike feeling),

  she felt her life drawn through her eyes

  toward some liquid body, rimmed in wings

  beating and beating, that would not lower her

  down to time. There were many things

  outside this room she should remember,

  that she should be turning in her mind

  for these kindled minutes, golden, rare…

  but thoughts left as she watched the fire.

  Intoxication at Carmel-by-the-Sea

  There was a wish to alter consciousness.

  —Of course, there always was. We poured

  half orange juice, half Beefeater, in two glasses,

  pinched our noses and quickly gulped it down.

  The mixture in our throats and bellies burned

  then shifted to a silvery smooth glow

  that radiated through our hands and faces.

  That was the sweet part. But the rest was sour.

  (For years I couldn’t stand the smell of gin.)

  Experience was our experiment.

  We snuck out my low window to meet boys

  and loll around the unlit, empty town,

  down to the sea, if we had time to spare.

  Its slosh of blue, its steady, vagrant hum,

  mirrored our own inexact momentums.

  At thirteen years, my grades were plummeting

  but life had opened up, to people, air,

  and landscapes tugging me from home like tides.

  The gin thing didn’t last. Intoxications

  one after another were identified,

  tested and tossed. What moves me, from this distance,

  is how we fell so hard for everything

  that drew us in: the pure, straight sentiments

  driving our actions, even to stupid risks.

  We were unused to being tentative,

  the careful step. Yes. I remember most

  that spirit of our trying, which is lost.

  Horizontally, I Moved

  I let my raw voice rise

  but I was chastised, asked to hold my tongue.

  I couldn’t see the scenery for wings.

  What good is blocked out paradise?

  And hour after hour to hear that

  pallid music: dull, facetious

  words repeated to the same

  sweet harmonies, like the manna that rained

  constantly to feed us.

  —I was bored. I tore a feather from one wing

  and laid it on his throne, blood tipping

  the quill. God found the trifle

  and spent light rifling feathers to detect

  a spot of loss. So I confessed:

  I’d pulled it out for no good reason

  except my discontent. He threw me

  violently into chaos. Wracked with soot,

  my lush wings locked;

  now I could only lower myself slowly

  and sink until I glimpsed reflected rays

  in one thin strand of river through the garden.

  This seemed a lasting shape

  so I chose that for my seduction’s

  body: sinuous bolts with skin like waves

  of water. Horizontally, I moved.

  2

  Hadean Time

  It seemed, now seems, a boundless continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky; Save on that side which from the wall of Heaven, Though distant far, some small reflection gains Of glimmering…

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Hadean Time

  The old stars exploded

  and a grave new light began to form

  in accretions of dust,

  their metalled leavings.

  Things broken and molten tumbled

  uncontrollably, collided with the stars’

  lost pillars at varying speeds. The initial

  burst at the center faded.

  By emptiness, some was consumed.

  There was a big breather.

  There was a time of great reduction,

  of tossed and dismembered stuffs

  and the frail light turned on itself,

  folding inward, destroying most all

  of its mass. It could have disappeared.

  Then a huge flare fueled

  by near-destruction rosed the ruins.

  Scatterings of the old order,

  once dispersed, drew together

  with pulses and contractions,

  many surfaces, many directions.

  After all these pressures,

  amid much spouting of gases and smokes,

  you remained, trailed by your past

  through piecemeal space.

  You were fresh still, too fresh to trust,

  the globule of an exploded triumph

  soft with failure, not strong enough to carry on.

  You could have been nothing,

  could have been merely a mistake.

  The essences shifted. The liquids rippled.

  To be flat or brilliant or in between—

  Even fact, before everything happens,

  has no firm shape.

  Dark Ages

  With the oldest bodies of light

  we can see shreds of beginning matter,

  what came before

  there was any light at all

  and, in that vast state

  gusts of fog, mist, grayish gases

  thinned to ribbons and strips

  vaguely reigned. This was genesis

  not quite free of her past.

  When the earliest stars appeared

  one by one, each illumined

  clump and flame-hoard forged

  a distant fate. Some

  warmed awhile, then waned.

  Some grew hot over time.

  Some drew a molten fortune

  from whatever lit remnants they could,

  reeling faster. Some lost control

  and flailed to fiery tentacles

  clutching backward—they left visual shrieks.

  Those with a future in emptiness

  bulged from a self-scalding core

  but rounded their own reactions

  in the iron of perfect spheres.

  Their blue-red lesser fires

  brightened to white heat, white as an eye

  looking out on terrain unknown,

  still clouded. These were the eyes,

  just opened, of the seer shocked

  to recognize such distortion, such lack

  of clarity. How much still to be done!

  Thus chewing the matter over

  another, and another, was born

  in a chain of increasing vision.

  Each new gaze broke the grayish drifts

  afresh. The background shifted its bits,

  the foggy veils dissolved

  in widening rings of heat

  as stars, suns, other brilliancies

  (like eyes as
well) resolved to burn.

  Eventually, the seers cleared

  this place of ambiguity

  or portions of it. They made it an active black,

  colder, but seeded with galaxies,

  composed of bright and dark,

  night and day.

  There were chances for cosmic wrecks

  but for substance too, and order.

  Now, shreds of those first mists

  occasionally pass

  across the oldest source of light

  more potent than a billion of our suns.

  If we look hard and fast

  we can see them.

  Farthest Flame

  Whatever you are comes from the sun.

  It is useful to remember this

  as you go around chasing days.

  The sun is not round.

  It appears so because its geometries are burning.

  It cannot have a fixed shape

  because its edges are lopped by flame.

  Clipped, cut, carved in a moving margin

  peaked with fluid fire. Fire that is no color.

  Fire of such wild roil it kills the idea of color.

  Fire the idea of which is only a beginning

  to your mind and its elliptical frames.

  This fire is your reason for being,

  the reason itself, and in it nothing rests,

  nothing lives or breathes

  for millions and millions of miles.

  The sun has many tongues

  it flicks coarsely, it flicks loudly.

  Its eruptions are violent, a violence its own change claims.

  It can swallow its own disturbances

  on a blistered surface curling to the core

  yet send out signals through the cold of space

  ending gently, many millions of miles away.

  It has a light touch, this fevered origin

  after, long after, it leaves the place

  repetitive, terrible, where dark is eaten

  again and again by panicked tongues,

  where the fire and its tongues eat darkness.

  The Iceberg

  The iceberg moves will-less

  through shades of gray and gray,

  a tower of clouded glass

  seeming proud of isolation, rising

  in air. Or the iceberg’s top lies

  flat along the water, its misshapen

  turrets jutting below the surface

  like an upside down, Gothic cathedral

  made of ice.

  Around the tower and its moat

  or the inverted iceberg, or tipped cathedral

  dipped in the green-black liquid and remote

  in mists (if you could stand in the middle