Horizontally, I Moved

I let my raw voice rise
but I was chastised, asked to hold my tongue.

I couldn't see the scenery for wings.
What good is blocked out paradise?

And hour after hour to hear that
pallid music: dull, facetious

words repeated to the same
sweet harmonies, like the manna that rained

constantly to feed us.
—I was bored. I tore a feather from one wing

and laid it on his throne, blood tipping
the quill. God found the trifle

and spent light rifling feathers to detect
a spot of loss. So I confessed:

I'd pulled it out for no good reason
except my discontent. He threw me

violently into chaos. Wracked with soot,
my lush wings locked;

now I could only lower myself slowly
and sink until I glimpsed reflected rays

in one thin strand of river through the garden.
This seemed a lasting shape

so I chose that for my seduction's
body: sinuous bolts with skin like waves

of water. Horizontally, I moved.

Lisa Williams

Woman Reading to the Sea
W. W. Norton & Company

Comments

Remembering Evelio Javier

Some of our heroes may have been more brilliant or achieved more greatly, but I find it hard to think of any who lived more purely and more single mindedly than Evelio... his commitment to democracy, to social justice and to a life among the poor in our land. Februay 11, 2009 in Panay Island, Philippines is Evelio B. Javier Day. It is the 22nd Anniversary of the assassination of Evelio Javier. It was a stunning and decisive event towards our eventual liberation from Martial Law later that February 1986. Many in our Ateneo community remember meeting Evelio’s body at the airport two days later, and the Mass and the long march from Baclaran to the Ateneo de Manila on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1986. We had a Mass at sunset in the field beside the Blue Eagle Gym and ended the Mass with the electrifying experience of hearing Fr. Jose A. Cruz, S.J. read for the first time in public the letter of the CBCP on the elections. Evelio B. Javier was born to Everardo Autajay Javier of Hamtic and ...

The Moonflowers

It's as if the dark, which had before just been context, gave to vulnerability a permission, almost: fleshy saucers of spilled cream, so many parchment fists, unfisting; and now, in pieces, the delicate mask of an indifference offered radically up against what, each time, seems as unthinkable, as unexpected, as when, in the long dream of retraction, that sea that is finally not a sea, but what else to call it, begins again its shifting, and though to every push of the will forward there's something noble—which is to say, something lonely, also—it's too late. Carl Phillips Speak Low Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Evening Star

Tonight, for the first time in many years, there appeared to me again a vision of the earth's splendor: in the evening sky the first star seemed to increase in brilliance as the earth darkened until at last it could grow no darker. And the light, which was the light of death, seemed to restore to earth its power to console. There were no other stars. Only the one whose name I knew as in my other life I did her injury: Venus, star of the early evening, to you I dedicate my vision, since on this blank surface you have cast enough light to make my thought visible again. Louise Glück Averno Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Adjourn Sojourn

Search This Blog