Uncontested Grounds

Uncontested Grounds

poems by

William Conelly

A B L E M U S E P R E S S

Copyright ©2014 by William Conelly First published in 2014 by

Able Muse Presswww.ablemusepress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Able Muse Press editor at editor@ablemuse.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950254

ISBN 978-1-927409-39-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-927409-40-4 (digital)

Cover image and book illustrations by Cody A. Healey-Conelly

Cover & book design by Alexander Pepple

Able Muse Press is an imprint of Able Muse: A Review of Poetry, Prose & Art—at www.ablemuse.com Able Muse Press 467 Saratoga Avenue #602 San Jose, CA 95129

vi

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the various publications where many of these poems originally appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:

Online and print journals:

14, Able Muse, Carillon, Die Cast Garden, Drastic Measures, Eye Socket Journal, The Formalist, Iota, Loading Zone, The Lyric, Measure, Numbers, The Pebble Lake Review, Pleiades, Poetry Durham, Poetry Monthly, Poetry Porch, Poets and War, The Sticks Press.

Chapbooks from:

R.L. Barth, The Van Zora Press.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vi

IA City Song 3An Early Morning Postcard 5Traveler 7Sea Change 8Aubade 10R & R 11The Shooter 13Casting Away 14The Sailor 15False Summons 16Regression at 3 AM 17Midwinter 18The Stand-In 19In the Ninth Month 21Odd Seed 22Sketching 23The Lead Man 25

IIDoctrinal Epigrams 29Across a Gulf 31Creatures 33What Fits Mary 35Audubon 36

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IIIA Portrait Gallery 53In Paris, the Antagonist 55Evening on the Esquiline 56No Civil War 57A Sonnet after Chekhov 59Separates 60Dozing Off 61Treasure 62Sleepwalk 63Memento 64Sublunary 65Limo Stand 66The Ford Birthday Ode 67The Loss 68Ernest in Elysium 69Street Song 71Sadhu 72The Newly Dead 73

Remembering War 37Foothills 38Reflections 39A Seaside Triptych 40Illness 41Eros 42Intuition 43Gulf Coast 44Ex 45In the Vineyard 46Sex Compartmental 47The Keeper of Bees 49

Uncontested Grounds

I

3

A City Song

Do not return me to the country,to the talcum dustthat floats off tractor tires, that tintslate light with seething rustand settles as a mineral snowon 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 Junegood rainfall hasn’t averaged out,the near medieval gloom.

Spare me as well the hired menwho truck off Friday nightsto crossroad bars, who hear the jukeboxversion of their plightsblare 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 paythe service of bad debt,whose sun-creased owner, folded nowin broken wonderment,

4

stands gazing past the auctioneer,the house and Chevrolet,to ponder not the propertyhis neighbors bid away,but a blue, remorseless beauty thatfirst lured him there, and stays.

5

An Early Morning Postcard

from Russian Hill

Clutched on its steeps, above the placid Bay,old San Francisco bathes in pastel grayas if it were no city of the sun.

Each count of four, through swells of morning mist,I see the tower light on Alcatrazrestate the claims of land, and be dismissed.

Nothing else moves, or even seems to move,though what I took on waking for wind soundmust be steel cable, moving underground,

deployed to ease the day’s first quaint rail cardown Hyde Street’s rooftop pitch—it hanging backand clanging—toward the waterfront bazaar.

Soon then, a coaxing drone of streets will rise,and scourings of sunlight colorizethe monotonal drift of Bay and town;

soon then, a tanker ship will mark its trailthrough berms of fog, beneath the Golden Gate,reciting a persistent oily wail,

6

and quick, stiletto-styled aircraft descendwith travelers from a higher, lesser sphere,to witness humankind’s election here.

Remembering Edgar Bowers

7

Traveler

His plane arrived at duskwhile he sat reading.There was time, he thought,to sit among the leather bagsand tweedy-smelling coatson a vinyl 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 againto lose himself, not that way—for where he sat was an empty meadow,silent except for the hum of beesin an immense white noon.

8

Sea Change

at the town beach, Marblehead, MA

Pulled through sea vine and broken shell,a tumbling spot of cloudless blueflares up as sun and sky shine throughthe gray Atlantic’s wasting swell.

I bend down thinking it’s a stone—topaz perhaps—that’s playing backthe mottled light across the wrackwith heaven’s mild, compelling tone.

But this is glass, glass someone’s handonce carried whole, through lost affairs,to shatter where the gray tide wearsit back incessantly to sand.

Can I not see how death will burstour lives? How each bright piece will fall,and scatter from the world’s recallin elements to be dispersed?

A woman calls her toddler girl—the child who’s dabbling at my knee,and taken just as thoroughlywith seaweed, stone, and glints of pearl.

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I offer her my azure prize;then as roiled waters lift the calm,two hands, close-cupped, it’s off to Mom,cleansed of a clouded heart’s surmise.