Gillian Conoley
[My name is the girl with one glass eye said bitterly]

My name is the girl with one glass eye said bitterly.
                                                                                                  Nightengale
in the birdfeeder hung from the pepper tree opening throat to the body
of light in (was it spring?)

                           spring’s shipwreck––

high voices. the lank hounds
ramping it up over a highway arcing out into empty air––
where we

were resiliencies at the edges of time
dining on upended peach crates––

on lawn chairs dropped into the shaded pool
of the bottomless–where through the murk

Muses and Mediums regenerate the pool’s Elysian scum. I am the girl who
opens the seashell
that stirs the cauldron

that sings us back to the leafy path witch-worn and cobbled thru––

What do you walk upon?

Something already

in the blood.

What line of work you in?

job is Job is Job is job is Job it’s all part of an infinite

series    foci    aperture

2/3    _    1/8   scherzo     pattern I get it,

you look like someone I used to know

drinking out of a garden hose.


Can we summon by the hooks in the water

all the broken––as in the belly of an unsuspecting mother––

can we open the open
the hatchback to hear the Gothic echoes––a virgin forest asway amid the Giant’s sperm?


Tomb for Tit,

come, wounds–– extension cords carried to a midnight execution and left to dangle

there, a beheadedness played over
and over culture soaking it up I knew a Garden: meaning of the world is the intaglio of

it’s sunny and 75.

What do you walk upon? Something already in the blood inks a notebook, reconstitutes the

flowers. Do you feel a light in the sun

on your back, piercing through the water, it’s a light––said the said the I am the girl with one

glass eye said


bitterly, now let me go, she said, holding the notebook to

long opal tails of moon waving slowly

from time to time


saying No no no no no no no no no, I am

the girl now that we are on the page of infinite

length,


in the city of uplanded height, on the lawn of rising

green in the alley tunneled

down to a chambered core,

and I said how many people did you see on the road rolling up their old kit bag

how many people did you see


trying to get where trying to get there


trying to see the many people you have seen on the road

under the star’s starkness under the exits entranced

under the mistral

of rain


feeding the lengthening stream we step into––out of ––shuttering–– pictured there