Woman Reading to the Sea

by Lisa Williams

  his body had already vanished.

  Belltower

  My throat is a belltower

  in a stone cathedral

  tolled and echoing.

  Great pangs of discord

  plumb the hollow calm there

  where once woolen blue

  morning mist filled the arcs

  of the belltower’s walls

  until gray doves awoke

  in the soft down of hope,

  of desire. Now the bells

  peal all wrong, if an ear

  could hear deep, muffled chords

  from a tangled up throat

  that feels like a belltower

  rung wild with fear

  by strong hands. But the bells’

  tone belongs to no town.

  Io

  Because he is near

  you constantly explode,

  revealing the hidden liquid

  at your center, a sort of fear

  as he hangs there, his great density

  anchoring storms,

  the globe of his mass

  clouded orange in your face.

  Tides tied to this lord

  of your lava, his appeal

  makes you wobble. Your veneer

  —the smooth body he longed for—

  cracks, then spews out hot jets.

  Now your molten heart shows

  how a hard shell recovers

  with soft, flooding depths.

  Hades

  (Persephone)

  You who pulled me for your dark concerns

  must know that I never

  wished to be bound,

  only taken. And because

  overshadowing motion

  awoke in you the near-dead coals

  so they glowed, I would let you

  consider me ember,

  ghost with you through those ashen rooms

  razed of abandonment,

  comb lifeless pools

  so deeply inclined. I would gladly

  eat with you, touch, discuss

  that land beyond your portals, filled

  with the dumb and deceived,

  venturing out only to prove

  my barren preference.

  —It was due to me. Plenty

  could be had up there in the wrack

  of shallows, while we distilled,

  turning ourselves on ourselves

  like figures in a forge

  without light—.

  We became more solid

  by what we did not meet

  in the tenebrous balm

  of our element, the enduring gloom.

  Our outlines sharpened. Charred

  by a smoldering heat, we then cooled

  so much that our bodies,

  mistaken as husks,

  flaked from their cores.

  Disobedience

  (Eve)

  God, I belong to no one.

  Not even one of your minions.

  So when the strange man pinned

  me against the bricks, drew my hand

  to his crotch, I thought,

  Good! Let Him watch.

  Let Him see how I worship

  on my knees. In an empty alley.

  Let Him see how my lips

  open and close to the profane ballet

  of desire without a heart.

  In these rough motions that start

  from knowledge, let there be pleasure.

  And when the young man pushed

  my head down farther, slipped

  himself into my voice,

  when I felt the pristine statue

  of my body tip and shatter

  into many stones, I thought (again)

  Good! It does not matter

  that I break. It does not mean

  I should not speak. I’m not a thing

  to be defined, by Him, by any one.

  I’m not a thing He orders.

  I choose this prayer instead.

  If I am afraid, I am afraid

  of myself, or of another. Not of you.

  Not of You, my absent Father.

  Rapture’s Lack

  Why must lust

  depend on division?

  Why does sex stun

  when it’s most unbound?

  To be whole, they have always told me,

  is the province

  of a woman: to be full: fulfilled.

  Nothing about fear.

  Nothing about the sublime

  writhed desire

  locked in body and mind,

  the incapable aches

  roiling sleep—.

  What spurs the blood

  into simmering

  does not love it,

  would not suffer one lack

  to prevent its being spilled.

  What becomes one body

  to another

  is imagining, not truth. How terribly

  this sort of rapture

  —covetous, uncluttered—

  cleaves us empty.

  Geometry

  I made myself a circle, then a square.

  I made a box too small for him to open

  and then a portal which, from anywhere,

  displayed the magnitude of my affection.

  Once full of pliant roundnesses and curves,

  his private tapestry, I made a skin

  tight as a drum, impervious to pain

  and drew this on as if to stop an army,

  then turned into a blossom on a plain,

  rose-like and fragrant, luring him to come

  and nestle in. I threw the flower at him

  crumpled in a ball. It hit the floor

  and there I was: plain angry red, a sphere

  as foreign to his faculties as Mars.

  In every way I wanted him to care.

  I made myself a circle, then a square.

  The Goddess Stopped

  (Thetis)

  In that grotto I would go to, shadows

  rocked along the tufa walls

  and low waves cradled out to sea

  the bay’s evening detritus. Sprawled

  on a stone warmed by a ray that struck

  its surface from a gap, I’d rest

  until ready to enter the ocean depths

  again. He saw me in that slash

  of sun—was slinging his net of fish

  back to another shore—dropped it, and crept

  soft to my sleeping body to link his

  arms around me.—Feverish heart

  that pounded loudly! I woke to charge

  at his hold, a heron with flapping wings

  so strong they should have flung him.

  He gripped hard. So I jerked upright,

  a cedar tree with bristling needles

  and scabrous bark—he held. I writhed

  to a tiger, volcanic with tearing shafts.

  He loosened and I slithered free.

  —How could I be one self, yet so many?

  Proteus counseled him, and when he came

  a second time, as my shape ranged

  from wrangling fins to brutal tufa jags,

  he refused to weaken, though he bled

  and burned from what flailed, lunged, or scraped.

  No matter how she changes, keep

  your grip. She will be what she was

  eventually. Just wait. Proteus’ words.

  My last form was an icicle whose crags

  thrust tips like blades. Peleus wept

  at such concrete estrangements

  but he stayed. By the time dawn flared

  on the darkened tide, I couldn’t bear

  the weight of change any longer, shrank

  to myself again. We slept. I dreamed

  of the bay, its sickle shape held by the land

  and when we woke, we conceived our Achilles.

  Second Song

  (1978)

  First stacked heels, first gold hoops, first sexy

/>   skirt, green and diaphanous wraparound

  Danskin skirt meant for my ballet class,

  first junior high school dance, first pulsing bulbs

  and loud familiar music loosening limbs

  to moves I’d only practiced with a girlfriend;

  Does this look okay? Is this cool? Or dumb?

  Not wobbling between confidence and shame.

  Stabs of excitement walking in the gym

  darkwashed from pristine bleakness to a den

  of red light, strobe light, eleven and twelve year-olds

  finding themselves, like me, in their new skins

  of carnal creatures in a blurry realm,

  a place that in our minds could writhe with vipers

  or blaze with stars. We were the epic heroes

  in an adventure just shoved off from shore

  or else we were little specks inside a beaker

  who’d rearrange, assimilate, and die.

  First practice stopped, to lose track in the end

  of how I wanted to look and begin moving

  freely and indiscreetly to the BeeGees,

  Marvin Gaye, Santana, the Eagles, Chic.

  By song two, I’d wiped out all thought of home,

  the port that, dazed and sweating, I’d return to,

  a Persephone who wanted to stay with Pluto:

  changed on the inside, ready to leave her mother

  without a word or tear. I was that young

  and unentrenched, first body’s pull that strong.

  Safe Swimming

  Percy Priest Lake one July afternoon,

  me in my bright orange life vest

  and round, wide face, wearing a two-piece,

  red with beige stripes.

  The two of you sit in the motorboat and sip

  canned beer out of an ice chest

  so cold the aluminum drips.

  Into the long, green, odorous wake

  of the water, lukewarm and thick

  with its summer spawning, its reek of live fish,

  I drop my body, sleek and plump as a seal’s.

  The lake sheathes my skin, slips over and coats

  my hair ends. Up close, the water’s brown.

  On the boat you sip your beer again

  and laugh. I revise it now, a scene so crisp

  nobody but myself has witnessed it

  who’s still alive: the clean, white motorboat,

  the two of you leaning at ease, lightly dressed,

  you laughing, tossing your lipsticked smile back,

  your hair freshly set. It’s the mid-1970s.

  I’m a spark on this memory’s surface,

  its riveted warp; a watery sack of bone

  and flesh, a red speck. I am six or seven.

  After I swim, we will eat sardines

  on crackers smeared with yellow mustard

  so bright it seems leaked from the sun.

  The two of you look happy in this light

  I have captured. Now, you are looking at me.

  I’m swimming—see? I’m close to the boat

  where you are, but free to swing my vision

  to the forested banks behind my head

  that hold pockets of darkness, an infinite shimmer

  of leaves. The Tennessee sunlight hammers

  several feet of the lake to a warm, womb-like silt

  that makes me sleepy. I should swim back.

  But this day will last hours—we all can feel it.

  It holds us in the palm of a leisure

  so timeless it might still be here.

  I am floating separate, but know your figures

  are behind me, in the hold of what’s stopped.

  You laugh and talk. I could meet your eyes

  from my point in near-distance. The boat gently rocks.

  Helioseismology

  The study of acoustic oscillations that make the sun ring like a bell.

  No hole at the center,

  so how do you ring?

  Surface oscillations

  and low, thrumming waves

  roll across you, or shudder

  at your deepest range…

  One need not be empty

  to sound. You’re the stop

  in the cosmos’s hollow,

  the odd ball of particles

  hung in the bell

  whose gold dome, hammered fresh

  and still smoking, lies stretched

  far above us. The top

  of this rounded container,

  sloped down to a rim

  I’ll call wide open “lips”

  brimmed with terrible ends

  and beginnings, new clappers

  of bronze, which will take

  giant hold when you’re gone

  (they are forging already)

  I can’t—listening—see

  being stuck in the dumb

  middle dust of the gong-haunted,

  unsettled chamber

  between your last clang

  and the vibrating dome.

  The Climb

  A crack in the grass at their feet.

  —The man jerks his legs back

  and the black lash whips

  swiftly—a quaking crevice

  on yellow ground. It splits

  the dust-mote laden refuge of late

  afternoon with a low

  winnowing rustle, shoots

  like a loosed arrow from the human pair

  who—startled—start backward

  and freeze to stare.

  Its cross-stitched skin glints, slick

  with the sun it had lain in, an oiled refraction.

  Perhaps it had been basking in wait

  for dusk’s little animal jolts,

  priming its throat. Perhaps

  it had made a crushed-grass nest

  in the sun’s seepage, some golden settlement.

  —A gap of pause, in which two moths

  list, clumsy and fresh

  in ferruginous wings. The humans listen

  while the snake hesitates, time hinged

  on a break. Then, it slips

  into grass blades, yes, but this—it slips

  up, into the wrangle of branches

  of a recently-leaved bush, uses that

  as a ladder by which to loop

  itself to a nearby fir, wires higher

  the forked boughs. They hear rasps

  of jostled foliage. The slim body of sound

  skims bark, twines and writhes,

  unfixing leaves, while the pair eye this,

  their thoughts lifting

  —this being the last thing

  from this least thing to expect.

  Look! she exclaims, as it reaches one perch

  and the bough dips under its weight

  (it is a big snake),

  almost pours it to dirt. But no: it can bend

  for such risk, clamber what’s vertical

  to a place above their minds

  within the fir tree’s needled fronds

  which cast miniature rungs of shadow

  rippling its coat. It lies quietly, mottled

  by the softly blown fringe filtering light.

  A Cove

  What I saw there

  traveling with my mother

  along that dipping coast

  as I peered into small coves,

  private, unreachable,

  hundreds of feet below

  and tossed with lucid water

  —a guidebook green-blue ocean

  beside a perfectly white-grained shore—

  was nothing but the water and the shore

  and the black rugged rocks

  the ocean rocked against

  and the calm, dark, longer reaches

  at the horizon above an unseen floor

  that verged and slipped, I knew

  to desolate fathoms.

  It was later I imagined

  the fish, stranded i
n wild water,

  what a life might be that lived perpetually moved,

  submitted to the crush,

  back and forth, of a rocking border,

  the fingernail of shore

  never an arrival, unless by mistake.

  What you won’t find in the shallows

  of the Pacific’s shoreline coves

  is the giant clam

  whose scalloped shell might be a flute,

  an animal which does not move

  except to open and close

  its shell. But you might discover

  hordes of pale crustaceans

  gathered and thinned with the tide,

  and the grass rockfish

  whose scales are the hue of bluegrass,

  and the moray eel

  whose life began as a silver dart

  in some fresh river, and who will,

  with its low-slung jaw and giant eyes

  kill an octopus,

  and the fragile-appearing starfish

  who can, with its retractable stomach,

  grip and suck

  a clam clean of its insides,

  and the limpet whose foot strikes the rock,

  whose pointed shell looks like a Chinese hat,

  and, most telling of all, the small,

  circular, coin-like

  “sailors-on-the-wind”

  so helpless they can go

  only where the tide carries. They end

  up here, as if cupped in a palm

  always tipping, sloshed

  to a blue, iridescent phalanx. A bloom

  of them may wash up and die

  in a gurgle of color, stranded on rocks.

  In this spirited flux

  it is good to be flexible, like the postelsia,

  a sturdy plant rooted to the rock.

  When the tide blusters and swells, its stalk

  bends to touch the ground on one side

  and bends to touch the ground on the other,

  springing back and forth

  in the happenstance current

  its fixed, moving life.

  When I feel a darkness

  I think of the small fish hanging

  in their net of mist,

  helpless, silent

  as wisdom is,

  the water’s torment

  sweeping them from one bare moment

  to another, like the wave of a mood.

  Unflappable,

  occasionally swimming against the current

  (but not often), they prove

  the case that it may be stronger,

  when some force is upon you,

  to let yourself

  be tugged in the wake of its gesture,

  however mindless.

  If you wait, and if you move

  very slowly, it may catch you in its surge