You Who Were Left Over After the Stranger Has Passed
All the bitterness of persimmons oranged to lure
The fragile shell of something almost being said
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You Who Were Left Over After the Stranger Has Passed
for Dale Going
you who were left over after the stranger has passed
the last waitress job
wild horses uphill off 101 we saw grazing in the thundershower
now in a violent awful time tied in frayed ribbons invisible though felt along our ankles
we go have pancakes
and halfway down the block you have to stop to breathe
with horses I learned to hold both reins in one hand, gently, with trust, much slack
it won’t be long your systole’s sigh,
what I didn’t get to tell you:
there was a semen stain on the back of the silk robe I wore in your play
an elongated yellow splotch near the violet embroidered butterfly
that was life all you wanted
all your friends on a stage with you
one rehearsal, mid-play, all of us
went backwards with no one
for several minutes even noticing, not even you who were
so comfortable in time you could have been Stein
you are at the rim of a floral china cup
I sense that you would like to keep talking so
this is not an elegy this is just a poem
denim, for instance, also life
a floor-to-ceiling windowed room with unplayed piano
a pie tin glinting of butter crumb
a sister, a siren, a cinder
the black walnut leaning in
to take a listen to our world of decay’s unending ending,
“acousmatic,” a word you would like
its branches dip a light green fungus dust near
you who can part
without parting, you are more pleat than fold,
like the baroque poet Angelus Silesius
(another acousmatic) who also wrote backwards like and to you,
The Rose is without a why
she blooms because she blooms
she pays no mind to herself
nor asks if she be seen.
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All the bitterness of persimmons oranged to lure
All the bitterness of persimmons oranged to lure
when bitten into unripe
Earthlings, my darlings here are your rocky exoplanets
circling the same red dwarf star
magenta rocket shine in the uncatharctic war
Squash blossoms, how far deep can this tunnel go peptiding your systems
My head lifted from warm train track went on a road trip circling, looping into
feed, all worlds seem passing through
a more habitable zone
this is only one of a billion possible versions looking for
liquids, who cares if you’re a few dozen light years away
let’s try exoplanet LHS 1140b that full orbits its star in 25 days/Earth takes 365 /
And what of you, citizens all nowhere and here with your unexpressible
disobedient faces, turned outward, chins jutting further and away
adding oxygen, vellichor, bibliochor, smelling and sniffing for
paper, just what we’ll say
applying cool air in the ventilation shaft
winter abandons oceans
and any sign of nitrogen or helium means
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The fragile shell of something almost being said
Since I first began, and to this very day, I write early drafts in longhand in black unruled sketchbooks. My towering stacks became unmanageable, even dangerous, as they reached to the rafters in my carless one-car garage. Boxes full of sketchbooks and my writing life: books, magazines, letters, ephemera, most went into a flimsy metal storage container near a lagoon (!!!!!) in Corte Madera (it was cheap) in October 2025, only to be flooded January 1-3, 2026 during a King Tide three feet high. Once the owner, with his earnest single fan turned outward, let his drawn-faced clientele in, dutifully I salvaged. And once the storm, its runoff and high winds vanished, I paced and wept over all I lay out on my front lawn to dry. The mold spores snowed. The sun was its same relentless star. (I have an elaborate salvage method should this occur to you, dear Reader.)
In all my piles, I dug and found my sketchbooks, soggy, inky, blurred, warped. I set them up on end. When I opened them, I stopped weeping. My damp oversized sketchbooks had transformed into pages I barely had a hand in, these lost scribblings that had turned into poems, and those that never did, or so I thought at the time, became the spreading ink and newly uttered versions I was more interested in, alive and no longer mine.
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Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. The author of ten collections of poetry, including Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat, 2023) and A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2019) Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a NEA Grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane, and Sonoma State. A long-time resident of the SF Bay Area, she edits VOLT magazine. Her translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken (City Lights), appeared in English for the first time. Conoley has collaborated with artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Butoh dancer Judith Kajuwara.