Sample Poems of Karen S. Williams, Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder Author

SATURDAY MORNING LESSONS WITH MR. BRICHTER

for Gilbert Brichter and June Miller Hearn

The practice room white and bare.

Nothing in it but a piano, its stool,

a solid silver metronome wrapped in a deep oak box,

a beribboned little girl fresh from deep kneed plies,

toe-throbbing standing on pointe.

Next to her on a polished stool sits

a thickly set man with thinning white hair,

blue-veined hands. Brown liver spots

dot his wrinkled, pink fingers.

Every Saturday he taps a slender stick to a beat,

a wing-tipped foot on the floor as the little girl’s feet

try to reach the polished pedals. She plays and squirms and

squints at the notes, pulling herself

from visions of later eating popcorn,

watching her favorite “Sir Graves” movie,

into a land where she and her favorite composers:

Bach, Mozart and Mr. Beethoven mesh,

become a brilliant aurora, a constellation,

a consonance of music to be listened to with the body,

a new Esperanto of the universe.

Eyes fixed on dotted seas of music,

she attempts her newest piece. Unlike

the mazurkas, tarantellas and jumpy Scott Joplin rags

she’s tried before, this piece is fragile, exquisite--

Chopin’s polonaise, Opus 53:

lilting, hauntingly romantic,

more than four pages of technical virtuosity,

passion Franz Liszt said can be felt with no words.

She heard it the other day on public radio,

thought this refined piece of music, an ethereal soulscape

would be beautiful, perfect for her recital.

Her teacher laughs sweetly, says it may be too hard.

Let’s try it simplified, abridged,

though it’s a lovely little song, he says.

His pink forehead gleams in fluorescent light,

the lines of his worsted suit ripple with peals of laughter.

Yet she still wants to learn it,

in all its complexities, and does,

wants and lets its coursing sonorities,

its crisp, ripe torrent to flow from her hands

a study in black eurhythmics,

fruit of hours of gradual, progressive pedagogy

at the Wurlitzer in the practice room, the ebon one at home,

to drift the long hall of Wayne Music Center

into the ears and alpha waves of its students,

their memorized scales, octaves, left hand studies,

wafting out the Music Center’s doors,

stilling the brisk, rush of traffic.

TARNISHED: A POEM OF HEALING

From "Daughter of Abraham" - A Manuscript in Progress

At four in the morning, a book in my hand, The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer To The Heart of God. A word in Chapter One – “The Lost Life of The Heart” - leaps off the page at my eye, a shimmering insect off the vellum. The word? Tarnished. What does it mean? To tarnish? According to Webster’s Dictionary, tarnished means “To soil, or change the appearance of, especially by an alternation induced by the air, or by dust, or the like; to diminish, dull, or destroy the luster of; to sully; as, to tarnish a metal.” What it means to be broken, human, tarnished as metal. Outdoors, a rustle, a tiny patter of rain, perhaps the local Calico that scampers on soft paws across my porch and pounces onto night-cooled street. When I see her at day, trotting up a driveway, or two, not her own, she usually ends up across the street, furry, crouched low at nearby bush, sniffing and prowling its fingered leaves, the crushed leaf scent of its twigs etching an indiscernible path across her back, the white oak leaf patch near her middle. So quietly, she inspects branch and soil it’s as if I’m watching a secret unfold; twilight skitters of the tarnished plant bug. Flat and oval, gentle markings of white, brown and yellow across its tawny back, the skin of the tarnished plant bug is the color of sterling candelabra that has lain quiet, open to elements of Mother’s closet: mothball; sole lint; miniature powdered soaps; a brush of woolen hem; pungent wintergreen wrapper; fading Eau de Joy. Like no one sees silver dimming in a closet, no one sees the tarnished plant bug do its damage: how it flutters then clings, a nocturnal whisper to vegetables, strawberries, and tree fruits; dahlias; chrysanthemums; marigolds and attacks. Its piercing, sucking mouth punctures flora’s tender shoots, chews, debuds, unfurls spittle toxin, stunts what was not created to be stunted, but plucked, peeled, eaten and enjoyed; or snipped and cut at a perfect slant; placed into a bud vase and honored for what it is. Swirls of velvet color, opulent fire blooms, peppered creamy scent. The ancient proverb is true. “When you have only two cents left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.” Yes. Bread and beauty are silent teachers. The word “Tarnished” too is a silent teacher. The more I stare at it, dawn of the first day rises overhead, reveals undying swaddling light. A seamless aria, orange blazing sky, it sears my retina. It and my sense of knowing boiling the only tear I could squeeze out. The tear, fierce saline of bittersweet, inches a slow burn down my cheek, a soft green caterpillar in mid-spring, soon to nestle a borrowed branch, warm, covered beneath Imagination’s crust until the crust rustles at fiery pneuma and finally cracks, a damp, crumpled monarch wriggling out, a monarch with strong, iridescent wings; pumping wings; lifting wings. I imagine it soaring over porch, cat and bush, a dove circling a drying earth. And when the dove returns to its keeper, in its yellow beak an olive branch; fruit of course; budding; a bubbling spring of knowing. That within us which is tarnished and eaten, stunted at the pierce of the tarnished plant bug, only withers beneath flesh’s brittle crust. Polished and pure beneath crispy mottle, at unseen moments, at telling strokes, mottle and tarnish will shift and crack, and we, vegetables and tree fruits, chrysanthemum’s among others, will bloom again.

A TREE RIMS QIXING GARDEN

Inspired by the Richard Yandura pen and ink rendering, “Bonsai in Winter”

--We cannot develop others if our growth is stunted.

Because it dwells in a land of swaddling,

women steadying their feet to be bound

and re-bound in opaque cloth,

wrapped and tugged around tender flesh,

tighter, tighter, taut as wire,

odd a bonsai rimming a quiet park

would grow so big, it’s wiry timber,

thin, crusted trunk,

tall and purple, reaching sky.

According to generations of Penjing masters,

bonsai are to live in a shallow tray,

its severe constrained roots

breathing, contracting,

curled amid dew and limestone,

gripping shallow earth,

a wild serpent in peat moss.

But something happens--

A girl with bound, misshapen feet

observes the beautiful, defiant tree,

how outside of graceful bonsai pots,

in an ornamental park under winter sky,

in quiet, dense groves of evergreen,

growth is no longer rootbound, but strong,

untamable, incarnate in a tree,

great, carved mountains of the ancients.

The tree stuns and dares the ancients,

touches unimaginable firmament:

great white mists, forbidden cities,

crimson temples where the ancestors,

prayers and solemn chants live.

The girl’s memory

of the ancestors waft and float,

temple smoke unfurled in silence.

A wisp of grandmother’s fan

slices, scatters mist.

Winters in Qixing Garden

themselves bind. A glimmering icicle,

it thrusts the girl’s fingers into silken pockets.

Inside, behind a paper wall,

the faintest dragon screen,

she waters and feeds another bonsai.

Cursed or not cursed

this gnarled line of girl

to live a stunted life?

Appeared in Reverie: Journal of Midwest African-American Literatuire