eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Transporting us from Michigan farm country to the streets of New York, from a family picnic by a stream to snow-covered fields peopled by angels, the poems gathered here represent the best of Nancy Willard.
Willard’s gift for peeling back everyday existence to reveal something magical and wondrous is everywhere in evidence here. Ordinary trees become surreal landscapes “fanning the fire in their stars” and “spraying fountains of light.” Poems featuring Great Danes, donkeys, and rabbits reveal Willard’s love for all living creatures. “How to Stuff a Pepper” and “A Psalm for Running Water” coexist with poems about visits from God. The title poem tells the story of Willard at seven, while “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him” explores the joys and pitfalls of being a mother.
Offering imagery from mythical goddesses to pumpkin saints to wise jellyfish, these are poems of astonishing imagination and grace, and will introduce a new generation of readers to Willard’s remarkable body of work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480481534 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 221 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Swimming Lessons
Selected Poems
By Nancy Willard
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1996 Nancy WillardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8153-4
CHAPTER 1
Swimming Lessons
A mile across the lake, the horizon bare
or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches.
No sand. No voices calling me back.
Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair
push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns,
an inch here. Or there.
You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap
and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life
vest for your lazy little daughter.
Under me, green deepened to black.
You said, "Swim out to the deep water."
I was seven years old. I paddled forth
and the water held me. Sunday you took away
one block, the front one. I stared down
at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale,
not fit for a place without roads.
Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them
except the toeless foot of the snail.
Tuesday you took away two more blocks.
Now I could somersault and stretch.
I could scratch myself against trees like a cat.
I even made peace with the weeds that fetch
swimmers in the noose of their stems
while the cold lake puckers and preens.
Friday the fourth block broke free. "Let it go,"
you said. When I asked you to take
out the block that kept jabbing my heart,
I felt strong. This was the sixth day.
For a week I wore the only part
of the vest that bothered to stay:
a canvas strap with nothing to carry.
The day I swam away from our safe shore,
you followed from far off, your stealthy oar
raised, ready to ferry me home
if the lake tried to keep me.
Now I watch the tides of your body
pull back from the hospital sheets.
"Let it go," you said. "Let it go."
My heart is not afraid of deep water.
It is wearing its life vest,
that invisible garment of love
and trust, and it tells you this story.
Cold Water
When I found the stream in the woods
I plunged my face in and drank
like the slow machinery of cows
who camp on the shadows of trees,
drowsy as soldiers on a day
without danger, without death.
My tongue scrolled up water
as if I could pack it and save
contentment for when I'd need it.
The fans of the aspens fluttered.
I put my mouth on the sun
where the water sharpens its claws
on the slippery rocks and tasted
the hunger of herons who study
the rippling signature of water
and crack the code of the trout.
I rolled the stream in my mouth.
Somewhere clouds crossed the peaked
and rumpled sea and carried
the rain in their cheeks like light:
water so used, so homely
I savored my own birth.
I cupped my hands and sipped
from a cold pocket and tasted
a cracked skull in a lake
and bodies, skewered and split,
that rolled in the current's arms
in Rwanda, in Uganda,
in Lake Victoria, Lake Victoria.
When water hyacinths loosed them,
stinking, they eddied ashore.
And now their death washes
through every atom of me.
Beloved, if you kiss me,
everything we love
will swim in it.
At the Optometrist's
This is a fearful place.
From the lit shelves stare
a hundred eyeglasses—
the voyeurs fled but left
their startled glances.
Vigilantes of the Second Coming,
they have their reward.
In the twinkling of an eye
we shall all be changed.
And everything twinkles here,
the dynasties of gold frames
in the tricky mirrors,
the tinted lenses on velvet
plates, like the scales
said to fall from our eyes
in moments of truth.
No bait catches the fish
who swims in invisible waters.
The scales he sheds
are powerful slices of light.
"Pick your frames," says the doctor,
who loves to paint
and for their burnished gold
leaf frames buys old
landscapes lost to sight
under cataracts of varnish.
The frames he hands me weigh
less than the sparrow
whose engine of small bones
I buried last April
under the bare maples,
all of us squinting
into the new light.
Grief and the Dentist
Am I the main course?
How his cutlery shines,
his pick a question mark,
his mirror a moon caught
on a silver baton.
In his wickless lamp
a flame broods, ghostly
over a silver mouth.
Has it crouched there long?
Shall I be done to a turn?
The pain in my tooth:
I thought it was larger
than this wriggling filament
from an old light bulb
drawn in silence
from its damp chamber,
which the dentist dangles
for my approval. "This
is the root of the problem."
He points to the nerve—
a serpent plucked
from a porcelain box
neither safe nor beautiful,
its crown a bleached cabbage,
its two-legged root
clumsy as pliers,
the fire out,
the tomb empty.
A Member of the Wedding
If I could remove the head of the man in front of me,
I'd see the bride instead of her proud father,
her glad father instead of the nervous groom,
the nimble groom instead of the deaf priest,
the slow priest instead of the sprinkled water,
the blessed water instead of the wrinkled sea,
the wide sea instead of the crowded sky,
the mackerel sky instead of the wheeling sun,
the dealing sun instead of the drumming moon,
the bald moon, bride of heaven,
beautiful in her emptiness,
beautiful with nothing to hide,
beautiful as the head of the man in front of me,
beautiful as the bride.
Memory Hat
"Do not pack, flatten or fold the Memory Hat as it will retain the altered
shape."
—Care Instructions for
a Panama Hat
Headhunter, traveler,
Sombrero de paja toquilla,
hat of the straw headdress,
your brim so broad I am
a shady character, gossiping
to the stunned ears of orchids
and the folded ears of cats,
to lilies with no discretion
and whelks that remember nothing
but what your brim bargained:
Your secret is safe with me.
Keep it under your hat.
Priest of palmettos
and patron saint of haberdashers,
born like a galaxy from a navel
in the moist air of the mountains,
crowned without thorns,
brimming with beauty at last,
accept my head, Saint Panama Hat.
Holy martyr, washed, bleached,
steamed, stretched on the rack,
every fiber obedient, trained.
I vow to preserve you,
all the days of your life,
never to leave you on the window shelf of a car,
never to abandon you to an arid embrace,
never to flatten or fold you.
And when we are tired of each other,
I will boil water in a pot and steam you,
I will sing the last words of lobsters
as they sink into suffering,
their carapace crimson, their flesh a cream,
and you will shrink or stretch,
and I will place you in the sun,
in the curved arm of time
brimmed in eternity, shading the hill
of my head that considers the sky
as it throws down light, bundles of it,
on the tender riddle of hats.
The Patience of Bathtubs
I admire the patience of bathtubs,
their humility, their grace under pressure.
I have seen bathtubs like melancholy tureens
into which the moon ladles her light broth.
The saint who sailed from Ireland in a bathtub
found the Blessed Isles, and no wonder.
A strange tub once adopted me, carried me
for hours in its magnificent belly,
gurgled for joy when I pulled the plug,
and filled it—oh, Zen disciple—with emptiness.
How it crouched on four chilly legs,
a snowshoe hare in hiding from hunters
or a white cat willing the wren's breath
to make a small stir in the hedge,
like that Roman fountain in the Hyde,
marble-mouthed, leaf-lipped, muttering water,
filling the chaste basin with off-color stories
leaving their rusty breath on the streaked stone.
Guesthouse, Union City, Michigan
What strange soap! Like a chunk
of amber that windows a scarab's sleep,
it smells like nothing
but the hand that holds it,
though it lathers me in light
and loves nothing in this house,
not the best china in the small theatre
of the cabinet, or the draperies
dead from years of keeping
the darkness in, or the jars
of silence lacquered with fragrance,
or the ghost of my grandmother
watching over this house
in which things are done right
and paying guests sleep dreamless
under their own stars.
Flea Market
1
Records freed from their jackets
scratched past hearing, a table
of oil lamps, doors with the screens ripped out
marshaled and stacked, opening to each other,
clothes scattered in piles across the field,
as if when the flood pulled back,
the living returned to nothing
but what God couldn't carry or didn't love.
2
After my mother taught me to swim
I dove deep for what people lost:
a silver spoon, a rusty rod that harrowed
and hooked weeds, eyeglasses gleaming in muck
till I freed them, not for money
but because they had come so far, like dinner plates
gliding through portholes that leave behind
the indestructible ship with its cargo of corpses.
3
A vacuum cleaner upright among the thistles
imagines its greatest work is still to come.
I remember my mother urging the Hoover forward,
up and down, as if she were ploughing the rug,
erasing dust, hair, nail parings, spittle.
How much my mother left me. And how little.
Uninvited Houses
for Joan Gold
The houses kept coming
into her paintings, though she tried
to stop them, though she asked
the two barns, one male, one female,
who stepped from her mauve sky,
"Who are you? What country sent you?"
So many begged her to make them
visible; a silo packed
with the sawdust of twilight,
an ark sent to deliver the morning,
after her father died
clutching his Star of David
and his crucifix.
He is the guardhouse with a red roof
and a gate to the city of steeples.
He is the sky peeling itself to glory.
While her friend was dying, she painted
many safe places for her to be glad in,
tents stitched from the silks of riders
who raced hard and won. The last house
was a shadow of itself, the ghost
razed to sight on the wall after
a demolition. When it opened
a window, someone left
a blue plate on the sill.
What shines so? The bright
hem of the door answers:
open all night.
Fairy Tale
When you light a fire, I draw near like a cat,
crouching on warm bricks till the embers die.
I do not know the way of making fires,
only of prodding the logs and pushing the ashes together.
Sometimes the great logs twitter before they fall,
and I poke the ashes, looking for trapped birds
who fell in the fire but went on singing.
And if a white bear steps from the morning's throat
may I be still enough to hear him,
may I be warm enough to invite him in.
Swimming to China
To touch hair that gleams
like piano keys (black ones);
to live among porcelain gods
in whose hands peaches are scepters;
to eat rice with ginger
like slices of damp amber, using
two happy batons; to desire squid,
pickled leeks, shark soup;
to eat a bird's nest and taste patience;
to find the moon in my beancurd cake,
a boiled yolk like a ball in a well;
to hide soapstone monkeys
in a lacquered chest,
to open its jade doors
and find more than I looked for,
water chestnuts at prayer,
a teacup scarfed in dragons,
fans cracking their knuckles,
and a packet of paper fish
on which someone has written,
We are flowers.
Put us back in the water.
The Exodus of Peaches
The new peach trees are bandaged
like the legs of stallions.
You can read the bark
over the tape's white lip
where its russet Braille
is peeling. The peaches hang
in their green cupolas,
cheeks stained with twilight,
the wind stencilled on velvet
livery. What a traffic
of coaches without wheels,
of bells without tongues!
Far off the barn doors
open, close,
open, close.
An argument,
both sides swinging.
The blue tractor zippers the field
and disappears behind slatted boxes
like weathered shingles, stained
with peach juice.
I stood under peaches
clumped close as barnacles,
loyal as bees,
and picked one
from the only life it knew.
In Praise of the Puffball
The puffball appears on the hill
like the brain of an angel,
full of itself yet modest,
where it sprang like a pearl
from the dark fingers of space
and the ring where light years ago
it clustered unnoticed,
a gleam in the brim of Saturn,
a moon as homely as soap,
scrubbed by solar winds
and the long shadows of stars
and the smoke of dead cities
and the muscles of the tide
and the whorled oil of our thumbs,
and the earth, pleased to make room
for this pale guest, darkening.
The Alligator Wrestler
The alligator waits in her aluminum case,
shaped to hold the odd length of her
like a troubled trombone. When her keeper
cracks open the lid, anger leaches out
in hopeless coils, like the roots
of mangroves buckled and snarled.
Her mouth's tied. Two men heave her
pale body, bear it to the clearing,
and cut her free. Stunned by the dry grass
and the trampled light, she hisses—
is she dying of a punctured heart?
Her jaws unfold, pink and gleaming
and strange as a porcelain ironing board.
She fills herself with sunlight
till the keeper makes a move
on her. Then she slams herself shut.
Grabbing her snout, he sinks his fingers
under her creamy jaw and straddles her.
Her throat is mild and naked as a glove.
Flipped on her back, she's out cold.
Now we admire her head, slim
as a beak, her moon-white belly tiled
like the floor of the shower
in some dingy Y. "In this position,"
says her keeper, "the blood is leaving
her brain. In this position, she could die."
He nuzzles her cobbled ear, calling
in the sweet tongue by which alligators
choose each other. Her tail twitches.
She's back. The show is over.
The Fruit Bat
Because the air has darkened
like bruised fruit, you creep
down the bare branch
where you slept all light long,
gathered into yourself like a fig.
Little mandarin woman fleeing
under the stars on bound feet,
when your wings spring open
even you look surprised.
What are the raven's slick feathers
beside these pewter sails
raised in the foundry of your flesh,
burnished by light poured
from a wasted moon and a dipper
brimming with darkness?
Peacock Bride
The peacock bride comes in drag
to the gate, dragging his blue train
through the blond grass, flattening it.
Distracted, he snaps off a leaf,
a stem. His foolish crown shakes
its fistful of antennae but stays put.
I think he is mad.
It is hot, the field is empty,
and here comes the bride
in a riverbrown shawl. Oh, he wears
too much make-up; a creamy
center-of-the-road stripe circles
his eyes. They scan me,
and seeing I mean no harm
he stretches the blue mast of his neck
and sails away into the sunny field.
The Wisdom of the Geese
The geese are displeased.
They want to invent the snow.
Each has swallowed
a whole pitcher of light.
Stuffed with brightness,
they can hardly move.
As they waddle through tall grass
they drop feathers, quaint clues,
like the arch humor of ferns.
Something wakes the pond, wrinkling it.
It's bad luck to look back.
They step off into dark water.
The Wisdom of the Jellyfish
The moon sheds its skin, knitting
halos and casting them off.
On the beach, how they shine
and pulse and glisten
like the fontanels of the newborn.
What is it to be a lens
focused on the feathery star
of your own life,
fireworks trapped
in a bruised sky?
As you shrink to a coin
minted in lace, you dry
to a chalky spill. The sea
smooths things over.
Look inward, says the jellyfish.
I am all eyes, God-sighted.
I peacock the land. When I died,
I showed you the whole galaxy.
Sand Shark
Sealed in your pewter coat,
your belly white
as a starched cuff,
you died in the tracks
drawn by your dorsal fin
as you heaved at low tide
toward pages of water
turning and turning.
I could read by the light
that pours from your sockets.
Picked clean, they open
on bony chambers crammed
with roses that darken
behind your nostrils,
finely drawn on the rounded
cone of your nose, like
needle holes left
by stitches so small
even your breath
couldn't find them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Swimming Lessons by Nancy Willard. Copyright © 1996 Nancy Willard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Publisher's Note,NEW POEMS,
from IN HIS COUNTRY (1966),
from SKIN OF GRACE (1967),
from A NEW HERBALL (1968),
from 19 MASKS FOR THE NAKED POET (1971),
from CARPENTER OF THE SUN (1974),
from HOUSEHOLD TALES OF MOON AND WATER (1982),
from THE BALLAD OF BIDDY EARLY (1987),
from WATER WALKER (1989),
from A NANCY WILLARD READER (1991),
from AMONG ANGELS (1995),
Acknowledgments and Permissions,
About the Author,