Geraldine Connolly
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
...
Geraldine Connolly Biography
Geraldine Connolly is the author of three poetry collections: The Red Room (Heatherstone Press), Food for the Winter (Purdue University Press) and Province of Fire (Iris Press). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Chelsea, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review and The Gettysburg Review. She has been awarded a Maryland Arts Council fellowship as well as two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was the Margaret Bridgman fellow at the Breadloaf Writers Conference. Billy Collins selected one of her poems, “The Summer I Was Sixteen,” for the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Website: A Poem a Day for American High School Students. She won first place in the 2002 W.B. Yeats Society of New York poetry contest. Her work has appeared in eight anthologies including Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (U. of Iowa) and Sweeping Beauty: Poems about Housework (U. of Iowa) and has been recorded and broadcast on WPFW Radio’s The Poet and the Poem and The Writer’s Almanac. She teaches at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and divides her time between Tucson and a home in the Rocky Mountain West.)
The Best Poem Of Geraldine Connolly
The Summer I Was Sixteen
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.
Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,
danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl".
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled
cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,
mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable world.
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