Pastoral Mistake

The music of my imagination

held a wrong note (rope). 

The columns of my fantasied mansion

stood puncturing teeth. 

Even the canopy bed I dreamt of

pressed a lid, leaden with origin 

over head— 

each scenery like a painting

brittley described

ownership, serration, 

breach, a fine row of (gallowing) trees— 

What here is arable 

for us all? 

What here does not, us, 

till? 

Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, Lisa Williams now lives and teaches in Danville, Kentucky. She has published three books of poems: The Hammered Dulcimer (1998); Woman Reading to the Sea (2008) and Gazelle in the House (2014). A recipient of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and the May Swenson Poetry Award, she is series editor for the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series, and a professor at Centre College.

(c) 2020 Lisa Williams

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Breaking out of my chest, this heart—