Elizabeth Willis
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Three Poems
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (1977)
Among the mouth-breathing children and instant potatoes, the patience of Teri Garr slides from irritation into pity behind the local milk carton.
The man across from her looks up from the Wyoming landscape he has made with his fork on the flat earth before him.
I guess you’ve noticed something… a little strange with Dad, is what the man says to the ring of subjects with whom he shares this tiny country. It’s okay though. I’m still Dad.
When these words travel across the confused void of the kitchen, he has the felt sense of a calling without understanding what it is. The king is mad but he’s still in charge.
I can’t describe it, says a mouth that has almost lost its words. But what I’m feeling….
We watch him sweat through what looks like his last dinner with the disciples.
The table is a map to something.
Everyone searches for the line between delusion and prophecy. Where’s dad among the gamma rays and psychopathologies of the nuclear family.
Who will jump ship and who will be onboard when the next storm electrifies the air around them.
This is the place, he thinks, staring at the pale tectonic plate rising up to meet him.
LOOK AGAIN
Reverse the angle. It’s Teri Garr having visions and playing the fool with her food. She’s sweating like a sailor but she’s still Mom.
The equal rights amendment introduced in 1921 and nearly ratified in 1971 is undergoing further debate on the floor of a house in Indiana.
Who among the angelic orders hears her cry. Who backs away from the table to make a call. Who buys her a jacket with unnaturally long arms.
TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR
In a structural analysis of religious experience, those who are chosen move to the other end of the sentence; subjects become objects dwarfed by the invisible vectors that drive them. Real is what rearrange they. Them rearrange out inside.
When Roy Neary sees the igneous intrusion above the Belle Fourche River on television, he knows every word in the newscaster’s mouth is a lie.
Our man’s getting warmer. The landscape he had no words for, the one buried in his food, is exploding onto a 1:1 map of the world.
Two kinds of knowing approach the same horizon.
That he lost his job at the power company is a fact slowly crossing from description into metaphor. The stroke of night air offers him a new category. In the game logic of a government agency, he is now It.
When someone asks It what he wants, all he wants is to know It is real. We’re standing with him at the edge of gaslight in the full electronic regalia of revelation.
They’re called pilgrims, and he’s one of them. They wear flags and sunglasses and move robotically through the parted multitudes.
He’s greeted by girls from Mobile who’ve spent hours in makeup becoming creatures that can lead him to his own future as a child. Their rubbery suits cause them to giggle as they totter toward him, as they take his hand.
Military protocol tries to make it a hostage exchange but all the rubber-suited girls want is him. That everyone sees this—that there are witnesses—is a vindication eclipsed only by the radiance of the man’s joy.
The mouth of the mothership becomes a real mouth edged with well-lit teeth.
Dad recognizes a new syntax older than memory.
He steps onto her tongue like a three-letter word.
Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence (2023). She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.