8th Annual Juried Reading
Finalist
Leslie Williams

Leslie Williams' poems have appeared in Slate, Shenandoah, Salmagundi and The Southern Review, among many other journals. She teaches poetry, and was in 2000 the Schlesinger Writer-in-Residence at St. Paul's School.

Above the Tree Line

In the car on the way to the naked hot springs
brown bottles chink in a paper bag.

Soon we will submerge in steaming stone
pools our blithe bodies below
the delicious flare of cold.

Frosty morning, storm drain.

We will lie on the white bedspread in the rented
room, we will be damp and loose-limbed;
we will not hurry.

I will overhear a woman---

I am carrying her story for nine years
like the rusty buckle on my shoe.

--- a man asking, and her answers: no,
the neighbors raised a barn. My son's fourteen.

I will think then: it's OK to fold into myself
for a while, to need cake
doughnuts and milk in the coffee, be
all about unreadiness.

You show me the houses that went belly-up
high on the mountain, almost
above the tree line.

For nine years I am carrying
a view: bare frame structures, flapping
Tyvek, stacks of lumber. An immaculate
gasping air.

--Leslie Williams

(C) 2002 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.