Geraldine Connolly Poems

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.
...

Sent off to boarding school
at twelve, with a pair of oxfords,
a pair of patents, my sterling
silver christening rosary
...

Praise the good-tempered summer
and the red cardinal
that jumps
like a hot coal off the track.
...

By the time you walk up to the ocean
the wave has already disappeared,
replaced by another wave, another sadness
as in passion or the light dying at dusk
...

to lengthen my hemlines and straighten
my morals

because I was difficult

because my parents were tired
...

I watch you flare up from the Mojave backdrop,
obstreperous, a lyric of exploding tar—
bold and unpredictable after legions of vernacular,
tawdry scrub pine. I am taken aback,
...

You can keep afternoon and its dwindling mysteries,
twilight with its seedy hauteur. You can have night
with its phony neon and rented motel rooms.
I prefer morning when the air is so quiet the rub
...

Out of their secret places
in autumn, from under

dark logs and smooth gravestones
they come, black snakes,
...

Gnarled and blessed
be the hour of autumn
when spotted pears sink
into wet sod, and blessed be
...

There was life before us

my sister and I discovered
looking at photographs

we shouldn't have been looking at
...