Poetry Magazine
Stemming from Stevens
It’s not enough to cover the rock with leaves
— as if vernal fluidities
could be enough for the stern assault of fact.
As if a living ornament,
light and subject to temporal breezes,
could be enough to overcome despair,
that chunk of something solid in the air,
unmoving, as words repeated are.
It’s not enough to cover despair
with motion. Motion itself is flawed,
continuous motion a narrow, thin escape
from what is rooted. Leaves do sway,
but in truth, they’re only flapping out,
ancillary, uncertain, buffeted
this way and that. They remain the fact
they are bound to, involuntary notions
victim to the weather of a day,
gripped by what has thrust between the rocks,
flexible as everything not rock is,
reckless as imagining is reckless.
Source: Poetry (February 2008).
Biography
Lisa Williams is the author of Woman Reading to the Sea (W.W. Norton, 2008), winner of the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University, 1998). She has poems forthcoming in Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008).
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