A horse or a turnip
Your Wealth is on the stove
By the National Institutes of
the earth at night
As for Baudelaire
a picture of half your face
is all the world, like a new democracy
by Henry Adams
To thumb the wave
To get awakened
My verse, my vernissage
sinking to the hand
as green against the snow
or a pretty paragraph
foreshortened in pink
going through the season
from apples to oranges
a task I will accomplish
with all the dirt I came from
What did I expect
to break into the sun?
So begins our legislation
SONNET
To never say “I am solved
by this shadow”
I panic the way
evening petals
the wooded cheek
I am not bored
On this hidden fence
I erase everything
Caught in the mouth
of the dog next door:
the spreading heat
of urban violet
dying in the car
None of this is free
TRIPTIK
I’m browsing through
this crop circle
with Rousseau
in the woods
A confounded geography
of accidental history
Little leaf in the scrub
scrubbed away by the current
Green against the glass
and grass against the silver
A hair falls to the boat launch
like good money after bad
You look for the beginning
of the poem
between the moving x’s
of the bridge
Wherefore my masterwork
of plated opulence
The constant flowering
of our downward mobility
This is the I
I’ve learned to speak to
way, way out there
in the luggage and cabbage
A tripwire on the field
of Great Ideas:
stone from a mountain
box without glue
ingenious bobbin
into dawn
The machine day assists you
with its simple fittings
To drive so as not
to touch the world
To oversee and not to hear
its irregular sob
Choosing to be looking
so as not to be buying
This errand won’t deliver you
as you break apart the flower
To rise to this
to speak its fury
Elizabeth Willis teaches at Wesleyan University. These poems are from Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011).
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