By Gillian Conoley

Where the page was, do we walk

into the blown

door frame

atonal      soaked in cloud      our obsolete

hands reaching but not reached          and pushing glass away

more room now

clear nectar

for the happy Graces

walking in

the white glow

curling along

calla lilies

which flute and sway

with their austere

good looks

If we take

our power to the next

power

to the silence

on the other end

do we say hello

clear nectar to the happy Graces their disassociating hands more hands to reach for in the

flowering fibrous grasses

where the page was

a white she-goat

   we laugh over

Do we pick up                    glass

do we

take                          silence

a car fast            through a flood

throwing sheets of water

to the next car

blinding temporarily

struck in the white glow

If we look from our page up

to sun

how to permit voyage

going for source

and from it

Time

confabulates

the whistler:          a mother in the grocery store          her coral lips

an embarrassment doing

birds      a partial Sinatra

would we rather      she chew gum      or throw pearls

in the dishwashing

liquid.  do we fill

each empty dress.

if black coal hair was our mother’s like the bare-breasted island beauties of Guam

a father brought home

photos of

after war do we stare

at them, a child stung under dinner’s

table.  later our bare smooth

teenage legs rushing past

put boyhood friend on acid back

into car drive him

to airport to some

base                                        then Nam

his draft number                                        was One

sun

sun

Do we leave

nectar

to the flowering

do we have

Grace

if we try to be more holy

take care the screen in the church parlor

sip the nectar’s

tissue-like            contour

the guiltless guilt of whole cloth thick, lit as if

wax paper drapes the

pear tree

steady, short

still flowering not about to fruit

If we look from a page

sun curling over what

do we want

to point out             or paint             time is lost

unwaving

light

storm’s

blizzard

a car fast through flood

throws sheets of water

to the next car

blinding temporarily

the happy Graces  cutting shade providing chambers with their disassociating hands

more hands to reach for in the flowering fibrous grasses in the white widening white


Gillian Conoley was born in Austin Texas, where, on its rural outskirts, her father and mother owned and operated a radio station. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Plot Genie, Profane Halo, Lovers in the Used World, and Tall Stranger, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award, and is widely anthologized, most recently in W.W. Norton’s new Postmodern American Poetry. A new collection, Peace, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in spring 2014. Her translations of three Henri Michaux texts, never brought into English before, will also appear next year, with City Lights. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University. You can read other recent poems of hers here and here.

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