Lisa Williams

Maenads

It traveled over the tall gates of our gardens,
our threshold stones,

his song about something done,
gone, lost, a body not touched again,

not like our bodies. We made him reckon them:
receptive flesh—our flesh!—he left behind

as flashes through the forest’s deformations
though he drew the animals near him

with that bodiless voice,
though even the trees leaned down,

even the stones crept close,
even the dead turned, groaned,

even Persephone,
half her life’s light drained

—that wisp!—was pricked to sympathy.
Sepulchres quaked.

A ripple rocked in the underworld’s black veins
as a rain floods roots.

For something done,
for a girl who was far too simple,

who saw only a surface, not the peril
underneath, who ranged the fields

For loveliness, with a maiden’s erring sight—
just this, and this,

not what unwinds below
the wash of flowers on the meadows knoll.

Beyond the surface it is dark
and after you have seen it

you can’t go back.
It was his clutched mistake,

the dream that slid out of his arms.
Should he blame the dream?

Her own delight in the meadow?
The hell, or world, that underscores delight?

The blame attached to nothing. But his voice
took shape. For years we listened,

trying to turn his sight. How ignorant!
He had no more a body for a woman

than stones did. He surrounded himself with boys
as if returns to boyhood

would yank him out of time.
—Yet his song was about a girl

he loved as skin and bones.
It maddened us

to sense the pool of feeling in his song
denied by flesh.

By the time we tore it from his voice,
his body had already vanished.

— Lisa Williams, from Woman Reading to the Sea (Norton, 2008)
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Lisa Williams’s second book of poetry, Woman Reading to the Sea, was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her first collection The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998), which won the May Swenson Poetry Award

The list of Williams’s awards is long. It includes the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters . a Henry Hoynes fellowship in poetry from the University of Virginia, an Elliston Poetry Fellowship and the Elliston Poetry Prize from the University of Cincinnati.

Lisa Williams is Associate Professor of English at Centre College.

“The Maenads” is the Poem in My Pocket this April 30, and a fitting close to my month of Kentucky poets. I hope you’ve enjoyed this wonderful variety of voices as much as I have. And I hope you’ve discovered at least one poet you want to read.