Two
poems from Lisa Williams's Woman Reading to the Sea
followed
by a note on the author
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.
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.
©
Originally
from Nashville, Tennessee, Lisa Williams received her M.F.A.
in creative writing/poetry from the University of Virginia,
her M.A. in Literature with Creative Writing Thesis from the
University of Cincinnati, and her B.A. from Belmont University.
Woman Reading to the Sea, her second collection, is the
winner of the 2007 Barnard New Women Poets Prize and will be
published by W.W. Norton in the spring of 2008. Her poems are
recently published or forthcoming in Salmagundi, Raritan,
the Cincinnati Review, Measure, and other magazines.
Her essays on contemporary poets appear in the Hollins Critic.
In 2004, Williams was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature by
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Williams's book of
poems, The Hammered Dulcimer won the 1998 May Swenson
Poetry Award. She has received a Henry Hoyns Fellowship, an
Elliston Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin fellowship, and a Tennessee
Williams scholarship, among other fellowships and awards. She
is currently Associate Professor of English at Centre College
in Danville, Kentucky.
"Geometry"
first appeared in Quadrant (Australia), and "Farthest
Flame" first appeared in Raritan. Both appear
here by kind permission of W.W. Norton & Co, Inc., New York.
