Elizabeth Willis
photo by Juliette Valery
Elegy
The day I drove
in a driving rain
from realism to impressionism
a moving hillside fooled the town
What does it take
to make a happy ant?
a dropped lozenge
on the damp step
bumping into a friend
in the daily grind
avoiding death
Still you slip away
in a desert hospital
and cannot see to see
Hawthorne's hand
against your hair
the stumbling blue
of windowed air
Autographeme
A thought on the lip
of little sand island
An easy messenger
who forgot where to go
I came to laugh
in a dirty garden
A thwarted paulselessness
considering pearls
I was fluent in salamander
Everything wrote itself onto skin
with a tangled blowing
An opal eye looking down
on an errant package
A sky wrung of tint
What is the meaning
of this minor error?
The reflecting pool
no one could read
A beach fire snagged me
with its bright emergent eye
My colony sought revolt
in every yard
The present was a relic
of a past I was older than
Taking its language, I became an abridgement
of whatever I contained
A social imperative of silky fears
I wanted air
I wanted the balloon
Darkness flaked down like bottle glass
invented by a poor oily sea
A house made of soup
Others formed an invisible order
felt in every part
The male of the species was
louder than the female
Females made the mush
a sound of offstage sweeping
Boys played a game of torment
and sleepy forgiveness
while girls read their books on the rocks
containers of a solar plot
Little bird, fox on a string
A caravan of foreign number
staging death
So?
A smudge against the smallest dress
buried creature, of sly erasures
in the storied night, long e
cricketing awake, asleep
IV ( a few stones for Lorine Niedecker)
This I is an idyll
I captured the first day
the office between
the leaf and the external
Landlord I said again
you can't move a river really
yet with no apparent music
my face would pass
________________________________
Elizabeth Willis
Alive
New and Selected Poems
New York Review of Books 2015
