Sinking into the Leopard Pillow
I threw out everything that didn’t give me a spark
and hung all the whites on the table.
Greens and deep dirt browns and grays.
The sensory titillations of the day
entered each limb’s phantom collapse and gait, tremor are you
there?
See until you are gone and there is only what you are seeing.
Just trying that meant yesterday.
What to do today. Falls the shadow.
Copyright © 2015 by Gillian Conoley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 2, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets
“I was reading through one of the unlined, black-covered, artist sketchbooks I’ve scribbled in since I first began to write. The books are very messy, mostly fragments in all directions, but when I came upon these lines, they were all by themselves, on one page. I read the page and thought, ‘that’s a poem,’ and then all at once the title came to me. This poem reminds me how companionable writing is, how it’s always there, if you’re patient enough, and remember to look for it.”
—Gillian Conoley
Gillian Conoley
Gillian Conoley was born on March 29, 1955, in Taylor, Texas, a rural town about thirty miles outside of Austin where her parents owned and operated a radio station. She earned her BFA in journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, before earning her MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.