Elizabeth Willis - Alive: New and Selected Poems

E LIZABETH W ILLIS is the author of Address (2011), which received the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize, and four previous books of poetry. Her second book, The Human Abstract (1995), was selected for the National Poetry Series. A recent Guggenheim fellow in poetry, she teaches at Wesleyan University. Elizabeth Willis Alive
New and Selected Poems

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com Copyright 1993, 1995, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2015 by Elizabeth Willis All rights reserved. The Publisher would like to thank Wesleyan University Press for permission to reprint poems from Meteoric Flowers and Address, and Burning Deck Press for permission to reprint poems from Turneresque.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [Poems. Selections] Alive : new and selected poems / Elizabeth Willis. pages ; cm. (New York Review Books Poets) ISBN 978-1-59017-865-2 () ISBN 978-1-59017-864-5 (softcover) I. Title. PS3573.I456523 811'.54dc23 2014046870 ISBN 978-1-59017-865-2 Cover design by Emily Singer 978-1-59017-865-2
v1.0 For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

My thanks to the editors of the journals and anthologies in which many of this volumes new and uncollected poems first appeared: A Public Space, The American Reader, Colorado Review, Company, Critical Quarterly, Dusie, Epiphany, Everyday Genius, Jupiter 88, The New Yorker, Poetry, For One Boston, Oh Sandy!: A Remembrance, and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare.

Deep gratitude to Suzanna Tamminen and to Wesleyan University Press for publishing Meteoric Flowers and Address; to Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop of Burning Deck for publishing Turneresque; to Stephen Ratcliffe of Avenue B for publishing Second Law; to Ann Lauterbach for selecting The Human Abstract for the National Poetry Series and Dawn Drzal and Paul Slovak of Penguin for seeing it into print; and to Rachel Levitsky of Belladonna for publishing an earlier draft of All the Paintings of Giorgione as a chapbook. Thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support; to PEN/New England; to the Ucross Foundation; to Patty Willis and Mary Lou Prince; to Shonni Silverberg and John Shapiro; to Ronald and Thora Willis. I am grateful to Paolo Javier for inviting me to respond to the films of Joseph Cornell; and to Charles Bernstein for the occasion that prompted me to write Alive and Albert Mobilio for the venue in which it was first presented. My thanks to Jen Bervin, Lisa Jarnot, and Elizabeth Savage for their generous comments on this manuscript; to Susan Howe and Robert Creeley for early guidance; to Peter Gizzi for reading poems along the way; and to Lisa Cohen for her astute readings of poems and manuscript drafts. This work is indebted to the fine company and care of more people than I can say, including many writers, friends, and family in addition to those mentioned above. By way of beginning: thank you, Adrienne, Africa, Alan, Anne, Barbara, Ben, Bill, Brenda, Bruce, Bruni, C.A., Cecile, Cecilia, Cliff, Dana, David, Eleni, Fred, Gay, Gayle, Gertrude, Harvey, Jack, James, Jena, Jennifer, Joshua, Julian, Juliana, Kamau, Kent, Kristin, Laynie, Lee Ann, Marjorie, Mark, Matt, Micah, Michael, Michelle, Myung, Nancy, Nate, Norma, Omar, Pam, Pascale, Penelope, Piotr, Richard, Robert, Sarah, Sheila, Simone, Steve, Susan, Thomas, Tonya, Vanessa, Vincent, and Wes.

Thank you, Jeffrey Yang, for your generous spirit and your vision of this book. Thank you, Edwin Frank, Sara Kramer, and New York Review Books.

His daughter went through the River singing, but none could understand what she said. John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress ... on our continents, there is no spot on which a river may not formerly have run. adrift in skirts and in brambles fell asleep in this body where depth indicates time No one buys her ticket here. adrift in skirts and in brambles fell asleep in this body where depth indicates time No one buys her ticket here.

A lock of hair. Dark and a lock of hair. Tired to be anything but bright. Ferryman casts over a swimming earth. There were no oars. striving between light and the force of a body that is light (every so often lose then to have known it nailed to the space of a single I universing If as building from a limit (suffers even after metamorphosis There is a point at the center of a birdEnvoi In extremes of affection only to be seen when the minds a heart Seeing by the dark grass (your swallow) (my bud) Being sure to walk through it To be imperfect A crime and a gospel / is because of you at length and in these little falls

A Maiden When I found your face on a pillow of leaves you had already erased it. striving between light and the force of a body that is light (every so often lose then to have known it nailed to the space of a single I universing If as building from a limit (suffers even after metamorphosis There is a point at the center of a birdEnvoi In extremes of affection only to be seen when the minds a heart Seeing by the dark grass (your swallow) (my bud) Being sure to walk through it To be imperfect A crime and a gospel / is because of you at length and in these little falls A Maiden When I found your face on a pillow of leaves you had already erased it.

A nest so heavy can stay in the heavens only by reversal. By this law the knees are laced with abandon. I said to the young man. If watching is the manufacturer, and I lose you what angel takes the place of a dowry or distance in this leaf action? Subject to like passions as we are my soul herself, myself a possession I could not mistake for the man (his language and Latin) yet we are taken to a love passage I had hardly noticed in the late talk of money The work of love and the work of art has no sleeping part Is a drop of light in a small silver socket, a rosy dime in a daylight tryst Is a keeper and no spender As seeing who is invisible: a kind of flaxen thing caught in stone I obeyed and read further I am hemmed Though my heart were a pear tree threaded with fire Lion you leapt through me like fineness in the boundary gene Conductor you knit me as isthmus Can I touch it Night is going 200 miles an hr as usual In this way we find we are suddenly altered If I were a day would you like me better Where were you you who in a bath changed me How to be walking is a glorious porthole Must I insist on an absence more foolish and secret When your timbers a forest I cant see for the tree in my bed Gentle captive, it is a larger than murder we tender Fond and afire my style and my anchor Master theres a boat for no lesser completion than beautys sweetest dress when you look on me kind Who am I to stop this flowing Least of all that home mile Sinking in the real I dreamed there was a further island Perhaps (how I thought you) to salt that harness with pleasure Lovely hero where the lovely hero bounds an acre hidden between eros and its errors Finding a dozen darts beneath the skin of Watching the wire of a skinny flame No other lovely hero found the back behind her secret form of symmetry Her gleaming difference Her schoolish way in pretty understandings Said Not done Not said Undone Wealthy sadness has a way of winning everyone This is the end of my body as you know it its superfluous penchant for love its poorer costume, its shiny disaster What is a maiden, boatswain, but a fiery lair and a teary citadel By the smallest shipwreck a daughter is laughter Yet equalled as in a fable this Gibraltar goes headlong in a just kings love See how his hands are her mercy and measure her number and rescue O Perseus Pythagoras Pierre my Pierre What rules a bodys buried factions when laundered by morning When called by our names although we are invisible Sleeping I forget my animal When the animal comes Im forgotten because of it How was it called in its own country crossing a street in order to come inside so slender

Next page