CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Begins Gillian Conoley

begins with sound of bell ends with briefcase dark glorying day’s pantomime I feed on color I take the symbols turn them over I don’t understand a thing when I look, I sturdy the thread on the lake, form when I look, a face a living unity recomposed my beloveds cannot unwire in time for dinner against these couches these islands they roam the hallway’s blur nothing holds at this exposure I didn’t want my eyes to be my reality negator thick black plastic laid down over weeds bewitched female mass Spinoza tells us the animals walk solitary in the rain and do not question being whole   I cannot see and it is irritating me memory rains all over my family memory rains all over my work slow cool of the ice in my cheek I am ashamed that I would like to see inside the skull of my daughter and fix everything I am ordinary and alone a bosomy female figure appears behind the screen door the smell of parrots a ribbon falls from my daughter’s hair onto her plastic town in the big green and athletic fields one could imagine a particularly rigorous amount of fucking at my gate, the saturated mildly hysterical birds of paradise stare one into the other I am committed to the visual though I like talking, too and wearing several pairs of glasses, that is like the description of a film one pupil never sees the other though both may shift and roam likewise the dirt was fine, moist and coal black good to grow up, around, and in the history came along unyielding and in ill repair a system I walked but could not climb I met uncertain people with untaught though fully absorbed vernaculars a waft of baking on the sidewalks on the porches the cloudless simplicities to stay the field I strode my modern town hard into the falling rain I was running really hard away as if to stumble forward I was one big block shape I was many folded into a sweater I had a great desire to see myself now as a mother to that image and build further a humility of splendidness a riot of spirit I could die into and leap toward and for in joy if the middle range would have me now would permit me a particularly Blakean protein lodged too deep in my psyche and that’s what is wrong with me if when I look out I am turning on that subjectivity geodesic and unlikely hungry the narcissistic ego would find a way to get out of the pathological books I love dancing because it makes me feel strong and beautiful and made of muscle and air it is a weedy, unmanicured trail Kandinsky said an object was a narrative and so he disapproved of it deKooning said you are with a group or movement because you cannot help it I just wanted a church we could go to or stand in front of and beg to allow something to remain potential so the eyes wouldn’t hate their little dictators for one eye, a small Mesopotamian figure for one eye, a big abstract I look, and your face is like a part of speech not spoken a tragedy so near its comic ash one eye is my future, one eye, my mausoleum the divine in what is seen in which we view only the shade of possibility: a semi-reluctant scribe I read her book trembling scattered in every territory as one of the visibles this dispatch sun I wish you each euphoriant ephemery everything ought to keep on going I imagine my life Gillian Conoley is the author of six collections of poetry, including Profane Halo, Lovers in the Used World, Tall Stranger (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and, most recently, The Plot Genie, from Omnidawn. Her work can be found in anthologies such as W. W. Norton’s forthcoming Postmodern American Poetry (second edition), American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricism, and Oscar Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana. The editor and founder of Volt magazine, she teaches in the Program for Writers and Poets at Sonoma State University. □