Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson was born in 1968 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in Scarborough, Maine. She holds degrees from Harvard College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Wilson has worked as a grantswriter and copyeditor, and has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Colby College, and the University of Montana, where she served as the Richard Hugo Visiting Writer in 2005. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Boston Review, Colorado Review, TriQuarterly, and Volt. Wilson is the author of The Keep (University of Iowa Press, 2001). She lives in Brooklyn.

[Wind in bare vines…]

Wind in bare vines

rifling the flowerpot

someone extracted

the shattered pine from

the tulips thrust

standards out of walnut

trash and what now

crazes the gardenside

elms a neighborhood

you come to starved

animal standing

shy at the door I

wish for this

world I did not welcome

Relict

This is the ocean

dead-reckoned into

autumn estuarial

grounds in which drift

an aberrance of terns,

the few barrier

cottages closed up.

The small vowel-shifts

we have been through.

This trend toward hometowns

that are evermore

strange. The textures

eccentric in mud.

Not figuring your end.

You become the lone trove

of whole kingdoms.

Coal Age

trunks budded and scarred

summer experience on the loess edge of the moraine

fallings out between elders

beautiful forestations of made language

sister puts forth her little finger

on the tip in composite relief the damselfly structure exacted

a storm floats over the purchase

neither you nor I neither one of us

mass interlockings of leaves tiny waxed tabs interlapping

the false pines the puzzling pines

it has not yet occurred along the limb it has not yet determined to be spurlike

it is not yet done it lingers in the pattern of its advancement

are you long of this world I

am delivered into casting my bit among us

are you a being of more than one measure

ruffed at the back of the neck so none may hold me

The Fossil Garden

Some spare relief

of sedges so many

million years old.

As if articles

of faith were

unnumbered. As if

the seminal

mind could be prized

from its berth.

In the intricate

underworld birds

are abstracts of

collapse without ground.

You come to some end.

And love that season

travels hungry.