Elizabeth Willis

AUTOBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

The impression of type
in a face, in a hurry
a word in a book
surveys the upper plain
for a breach in the dirt

Her image falls away
like a mother from a child
the exhausted fuel
that circles at a distance

My mother would be
that ground control
that cell, and I
her missile, her alien
adrift, elliptical
a caution, consumed
of stone and ice
aluminum and foam
on a mission, on a dime
strangely Chaldean
a ring in the sand

Elizabeth Willis's most recent book, Address, is just out from Wesleyan University Press. Other works of poetry include Meteoric Flowers (2006), Turneresque (2003), The Human Abstract (1995), Second Law (1993), and the Belladonna chapbook All the Paintings of Giorgione (2006).