3 Poems by Gillian Conoley

Gillian Conoley is the author of seven collections of poetry. The Plot Genie will be published in Fall 2009 by Omnidawn Press. Tall Stranger (Carnegie Mellon, 1991), was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana (Italian), and Best American Poetry. A recipient of the Jerome J. Seshtack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. She has taught as a Visiting Poet at the University of Iowa Writers’Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College and Tulane University. She makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.


Lamentation for Martha Graham

On a country porch a traveler in shadow

is such a darkness you could marry

one summer night a lament with a mild wind,

refrain to refrain. Drive the gravel to lyric,

and a movement never lies,

a fate takes shape. Noguchi’s metal dress.

Bead your lashes with a wax candle,

Compose a face

Human and flawed like art out of nothing

and try for a few hours to live forever

though they’ll cut in two,

the river and the moon.

Live alone in time, each gesture

the ruth of a sudden rain,

a wind turning through a red farmhouse

flush with cloud, Appalachia,

cold air of the white camellia.

It’s the human gait.

On the frontier a woman fell backwards

in a black evening gown,

her sinewy waist an enemy of snow.

Leaving an expanse so wide, sweet audience,

we did not want the night to end.

We did not want to leave the building.

Elsewhere

Incommunicado, the moon a used factory,

House-a-fire. Rough women

walk home satisfied

after each has told her story

like a wind outside

a given space.

Before the tracks take a curve

and the rain comes down

I like to walk

skirt toward a border

under moving, misshapen clouds,

heaven of the lady

whose train overflows.

My hands free of pockets

in any event

when things can happen to you

the proper size,

and you can lose

the little weight you have in the world.

All day a captive voice

says “afternoon,”

but that’s not so

under a half-moon made of lead.

An unmarked car will start automatically,

its hood vibrating, and yet serene.

There will be a going to the opening and entering.

Dirt road saying I can keep Beauty in its place. Trust me.

3/1/91 4/29/92

The sun sticks its head in the ocean,

God is and God dies,

and the night becomes as intimate as a little mall.

A bus noses down

narrow streets, summer greets us

coolly from a screen. The same sparrows as yesterday

start to wake in the disheveled wigs of the royal palms,

in a melody all

broken wings and artificial flowers.

A sparrow bathes in a puddle,

in ashes, slow, hesitant, like a small nation’s

unconfident leader, and despair

won’t turn into rapture

it persists. Where speeches end, a madman

faces a dark canvas

as he would the face of a beloved, and begins

to mutter

in a versatile, alien language

pure as music

something about the new clarity.

Our children break the mirror with an axe.

Whites beat a black to death,

blacks beat a white to death,

only no one dies.

Behind curtains the protected

stretch out still

upon the silken red divan. The epoch won’t end,

the heart beats and is beaten, smoke

follows lightly as the breath of a sleeper,

and the dawn is hoary with dew.

--poems are taken from BECKON (Carnegie-Mellon, 1996)