ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FIVE POEMS
by Christopher Connelly

Waking Up

Ten thousand knots snap,
and low notes that taste like brass
leap out of the human register.

When I wake up the struggle is not in my belly
with its mountains and valleys
pale from a lack of sun.
What's left behind hovers over me
and every moment is dispersed further.
The first step is wanting to rise
and the second forgetting about it.

It's staring at the inscription at the bottom of a bowl
and realizing, as the letters become clear,
that it's a name I already knew.

It's not the space between I and myself
and not the person to whom it should be given,
who loved me enough to make this gift.

Hours with nothing but darkness above me
is not enough to press these three together so tightly
that morning can't pry them apart.

Forgive me for ever wanting more than this!



Silence

Between sirens' whipcurls
and the shouts that are thrown up from the sidewalk
and then fall,
a shaft of silence glides through your skull
and you are in the courtyard of a Spanish monastery,
lured around a garden
by a bee as thick as your thumb.
There's no snow on the tiled pool's surface
to cover lines that dive into the knots and filigrees of
Arabic letters.
You step towards petals floating at its center
and loose rocks in the blacktop skid away.
As you grab onto some woman's linen coat
to stop from falling into traffic,
the important question comes--
"What will you do with the garden?"



I Want to Sleep

I want to sleep as deeply as a saint
and while I'm sleeping my hair to grow until it's filled my
bed.
I want to sleep with my mouth open,
to fall so completely asleep
anyone could crawl in without waking me up.
I need to sleep and to keep on sleeping until I've watched
a man die with one eye
and then with the other, seen the same man swallow his bed
whole.
I want to sleep and after my body's been burned up to keep
on singing.
I want to sing and to sleep,
and most of all to sleep while I'm singing.
I want to sleep.
I want to sleep.
I want to sleep.



A Winter Poem

A man crosses a field with one foot dropping into a furrow.
He's not following a plow.
I can't tell if he's waving his arm to stay balanced
or if he's sowing.

If he were Jesus he wouldn't need seeds
to coax stalks of corn through the snow.
As he steps over the fence line
pheasants kick out of the grass that still shows.

I don't know why he decides to trust the ice in the ditch
any more than I understand how a God could choose to die.
In Michigan the fields stay frozen a long time.

At Night

We give up walls and roofs to the night
and blessedly, it gives us nothing,
only the space to open into
and then, without catching anything,
be folded back in.