Lisa Williams

when I beheld a fire win out against a hemisphere of shadows. —Inferno, Dante (tr. by Allen Mandelbaum) If I could hold a fire against a hemisphere of shadows, hold it close, not so that damage finds my hands, but so fire scatters galvanizing strands, my pupils responsive to the flames’ unbridled tutelage as they tell me nothing but these little jumps out of your definitions, small or large or leaping, sinking, slumped

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.

This is what poetry is (says the Road), a laying down of uniform pattern across a land you can't control but which you think it best to flatten. It's far from vivid. Look at the whole flamboyant forest! Look at the paths that can't be uttered by a mouth and at the scattered arcs of light more integral to this wide planet than words will ever be. Your lines? Like railroad tracks that cut the bracken, bring something through, then disappear. No one knows what speck was taken or where it moved, and no one cares.