©2004 by William Conelly
Acknowledgments:
Some of these poems previously appeared in A Green Sleep, a Robert L. Barth chapbook; in Drowned Towns, The Van Zora Press, Alan Armstrong, editor/publisher; and in Light Quarterly, John Mella, editor/publisher.
A City Song
The Shooter
Sketching
TravelerII
Do not return me to the country,
to the talcum dust
that floats off tractor tires, that tints
late light with seething rust
and settles as a mineral snow
on scrolling harrow cuts.Spare me the feed shop talk of drought,
dry phases of the moon,
eclipse, sunspots, a heated sea,
and if by early June
good rainfall hasn't averaged out,
the near Biblical gloom.Spare me as well the hired men
who truck off Friday nights
to crossroad bars, who hear the jukebox
versions of their plights
blare gravely through ad spangled murk:
love and lose, drink and fight.Don't fetch me out to margin lands,
bleached sour with daily sweat,
where hard-won crops cannot quite pay
the service of bad debt,
whose sun-creased owner, folded now
in broken wonderment,stands gazing past the auctioneer,
the house and Chevrolet,
to ponder not the property
his neighbors bid away,
but a blue, remorseless beauty that
first lured him there, and stays.
She drifts to sleep then wakes again,
The night as close to eyes and skin
As water warmed by a dark sun.From shapeless hills a coyote pack
Yelps out success, or else its lack,
Like minions of oblivion.Remembering a schoolyard dare,
She rises sightlessly to stare
Unblinking through the tent door screen.And sees a yearling doe, neck shot,
Bound wildly through a barley plot
On land some thirty years unseen.Dogs drag it down. The yelping stops;
Yet heart's blood welters up and drops
On blackened earth she still can smell...That makeshift hunt with older boys,
Her hasty aim, the gruesome noise,
Shadows among the shades of hell.
north along the Kennebec
Array the sun as a white coal
Above the riverside
Where alder leaves are hotly, limply hung.Add texture to a mossy shoal
As shingled waters lap
In shoreward from the dark, ensilvered flood.Midstream an anchored raft must tug
Its dripping painter, heat
Drenched like the boulders that it bobs among,While young, recumbent swimmers shrug
Their weight against the downhill
Shove of rapids tinged with river mud...What else absorbs a studied gaze?
Cliff swallows skimming drinks?
The gnat hoard orbiting a berry bush?Noon's incandescence building haze
Through a reluctant shade,
Stirring long wisps of it beneath gray treesLike higher, whiter river flow?
And listen: there's a sound
Beyond the children's calls and water rush,The sudden, eerie tremolo
Of fisher loons, dispatched
It seems, from nowhere on a dying breeze.
His plane arrived at dusk
while he sat reading.
There was time, he thought,
to sit among the leather bags
and tweedy-smelling coats
on a comfortable sofa and read,
time to be lost in reading.
But stunningly, when he looked up,
the lobby and the ramp were gone.
There was no plane, no tower,
no trail of lights into the sky.
The very building slid around him.
He swore he would not read again
to lose himself, not that way,
for where he sat was an empty meadow,
silent except for the hum of bees
in an immense white noon.
Up, up where ideal lighting may prevail,
Where nagging blemishes decrease with scale
And rush hour guarantees an audience,
There don't we all aspire somehow to be,
Promoted over ordinary hacks
Like billboards over daily almanacs,
Clear of our failures and false modesty?And what terse sum, what thumbnail of our lives
Provides the grand pastiche we'll advertise?
Why, those few things we do of consequence
From which all else derives: nudge through a deal,
Mark time with brilliance, bake our mother's quiche,
Mate well, mate often, acquiesce and teach,
Whatever makes our inborn yearnings real:Imagine us ten floors above the strip
While strings of cars converge to just a pip
Out on the city's thin circumference!
Imagine height and overweening size!
At dusk deep reds and blues dim our display,
It's true, but well-placed floods whisk those away,
Relight the grandeur of our teeth, our eyes.
Outside a woman calls my name
and though it's night, and she's a stranger,
I start up blinking just the same.
Her voice is laced with hurt or danger.She skirts the darkened shrubs and lawn
still calling, I deduce, her cat.
I can lie back again and yawn.
No woman wants me quite like that.
Apis mellifera adansonii
The San Franciscan drew me deeper in
His hidden garden. Stirring snowy blooms
That hung along the path I slowly came,
Admiring May's profuse displays
Aloud through all his scented outdoor rooms.Our days are cruciform, remarked my host;
The broad crossbeam we comprehend is raised
And held in place by main force we do not.
Observe ahead a fieldstone shed
Where this enduring truth may be appraised.Strewn over to the eave by linden boughs
In blossom, stone and masonry held back
A green descending slope of higher trees,
Appearing like a landlocked dike
Which bees invaded by a window crack.As we approached the building's door, I heard
The dint of wings evolve into a storm
Of gathering from fragrance overhead,
And then that sound recede around
The heavy, central buzzing of a swarm.I feared we'd be attacked by soldier flights
And stung, perhaps to death, but he tugged wide
The weathered door, revealing workday tools,
A sink and pump, with forms aslump
In gouts of bees clearly preoccupied.Soon they will sting, he murmured, but not yet.
Observe the hexagon's brown wax outline
On handle wood; look how the insects creep
The empty spout, cling, and soar out
Like water sprung to life in God's design.
along the Parkway
Calm and country New York's not;
It towers on its iron footings
Preparing yet one greater step.Blackbirds meantime are undisturbed.
Their glossy heads jig back and forth
To scout the clear-cut roadside grasses.The shock of car tires whocking into
Potholes just two strides away
Subdues their tattings not the least;Nor does the mist that gutters down
A black and cancerous canal
Offend their sense of daily being.They can accept the monolith
With its eight million changing faces;
Dart and flock its cubist canyons;Choose rightly through high tombs of air
One phone line limed with wizened sun,
And home despite who's looking.
"A keen principled intelligence," said Stephen Sossaman of Conelly as a poet; "a master of rhyming, rhythmic poetry," X. J. Kennedy stated. Conelly is currently teaching in the Open Studies program at the University of Warwick, U.K., between classes and books walking the grounds of Warwick Castle, feeding the mallards and reporting that life is good. Email him at wmconelly@yahoo.com.