Winter Journal: Gray Shadings

By Emily Wilson b. 1968 Emily Wilson

Barely discerned clouds

Hard, hard to get here

what worth, what worth

River of steel.

River of no one becoming you.

Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms

To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their

strangeness

The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness

The few elms dismembering

The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining

To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes

and its filters

It is lost to the surface of this river

The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface

resisting, unetchable

Now the faint rain.

I don’t know what to do with all this waiting

things getting themselves readied toward emptiness

The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its

exfoliating, its rivening

its being disfigured by fortune

and by wind

A crone with old frills at her hair

The grasp of her toward me

Emily Wilson, “Winter Journal: Gray Shadings” reprinted from The Keep. With permission Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

Source: The Keep (University of Iowa Press, 2001)

Biography

Emily Wilson was born in Ohio and grew up in Maine; she was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collections of poetry include The Keep (2001); Morpho terrestre (2006), a limited-edition book with prints by Sara Langworthy; and Micrographia (2009). Poet James Galvin noted in the Boston Review that Wilson’s poetry matches “wildness of diction with precision of sense.”

Wilson has . . .

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