Aquatic Herd — Blackbird Archive

← v12n1, Spring 2013

A tangle of white horns

bristles above the line of water—

You swim to graze, your pasture

those foliaged margins steeped in

accrual, like a word you can hear,

the hiss and rustle of bodies

plying wheels of water, the grind

of your teeth on familiar flourish.

Morning frays from the lake

this hour you don’t

know barrenness, dry

stretch of sand without a trickle

or bloom. You are at home near algae,

near succulent moss, hooves scribbling

bottom layers.

Though you are helpless

to those who could see you graze

you might look dangerous—

Bodies hidden. Just heads

crowned with ghostly architecture—

a stripped and estranging forest

all branches. Or hollow spines.

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams is the author of two collections of poetry, Woman Reading to the Sea (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), which won the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 May Swenson Poetry Award. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry , Image , Measure , Poetry Daily , Verse Daily , and other magazines, and in anthologies including Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (Columbia University Press, 2010), The Best American Poetry 2009 (Scribner Poetry, 2009), and American Poetry: Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). Her essays on contemporary women poets have appeared in The Hollins Critic , The Cincinnati Review , and Poetry Daily . She is the recipient of a 2011 Brown Foundation Fellowship, a 2010 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a 2004 Rome Prize. Williams is an associate professor of English at Centre College. Photo by Philip White, 2012