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Sinking into the Leopard Pillow

Gillian Conoley

1955 –

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.

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.

About Gillian Conoley

Themes

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About this Poem

“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

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More by this poet

The Patient

I am patient. That is my mineral fact. 

         I have long term storage in double helixes

my two long polymers of nucleotides 

         my backbone made of sugars and phosphate groups 

joined by ester bonds. I see imagist pears dissolving down



golden arms I hear needle-less the sleep aid cd's

         real violins, then float blue-black 

at the eventide, injure

         of the taut to and fro, cut-back 

asphalt road, a path of greening twigs nourishing


nothing personal.

Gillian Conoley

2011

It Was the Beginning of Joy and the End of Pain

The sewing machine had a sort of genius, high, oily and red

over that little hellion’s pants.     Joy and Pain crossing legs,

then coloring in the poverty—

Are we a blue, blue whine in the restive trees?

Are we under the imprecision?

The beginning endless, ending like chasing deer out of the yard,

sphere unto sphere it takes a loyal Enthusiast
to be
Death’s mother.

Gillian Conoley

2005

Poems

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Sinking into the Leopard Pillow

More by this poet

The Patient

It Was the Beginning of Joy and the End of Pain

As If I Am Someone Else

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