Woman Reading to the Sea

by Lisa Williams

  and hold you as one body holds another body,

  and return you to your life.

  NOTES

  “Woman Reading to the Sea”: My thanks to Franco Mondini-Ruiz for the inspiration of his painting, titled the same, for the title poem and the title of this book, and for his generosity in providing the use of his painting for the cover.

  Epigraph to Part 1: Lines from “Beauty” from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publishers Inc.

  Epigraph to Part 2 from Paradise Lost, Book III, edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg.

  “Hadean Time”: That period, approximately 4.5 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, during which the solar system formed and the earth changed from a liquid to a solid state.

  “Death and Transfiguration of a Star”: Quotations in this poem were taken from Herbert Friedman’s, The Astronomer’s Universe, W. W. Norton and Company: New York, London (1990), Chapter 26.

  First epigraph to Part 3 from The Aeneid, Book VI, translated by Robert Fitzgerald.

  Second epigraph to Part 3 from Antiquitez de Rome, translated by Edmund Spenser.

  Epigraph to Part 4 from A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene Nine (my addition in brackets).

  “Disobedience”: I am grateful to Franco Mondini-Ruiz for his insightful assistance with this poem.

  “A Cove”: Special thanks to my stepfather, Douglas Vaughan, a former marine biologist, who assisted me with some of the details in this poem.