Gillian Kiley
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Gillian Kiley’s work has appeared in journals including the Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Swerve, Keyhole, and others, and is forthcoming in the anthology A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years. She has taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Rhode Island, and now lives and works in Providence, RI.
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Cathedral
Some days your ideas
have just the basic, bright colors of parties,
the feel of ordinary foods,
and on sick days your rapture is just a slither of innards,
your prayers, water pouring over the same grounds.
Maybe it’s better here when the wind blows in from the left,
if it can’t come straight down.
Projections over the south portals
rattle in this weather pattern, the stone heads
nicked from a wrecked temple disgorging carved acorns,
veined with plant stalks, worked back
into ancient spackle and held until they dried on.
So numerous, we give them our barest notice,
as in an ardent and continuing wind
we forget it and tend to other things.
To the old women kneeling with rosaries –
stop calling Jesus a fruit.
To Mary, rinsed of ashes, nuzzled by kittens,
be glad the cloak of all the old pictures turned to stone.
The upright folds are arranged as still throats,
keep festival sounds and the errant groan
and the long sigh from flapping out of the sheet.
What keeps in the columns keeps,
and if the wind pries it out, we call it wind.
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Ceremonial Tune
No one else knows what you know,
even as you first meet the subject of inquiry
and its tireless transformations.
A boat becomes a houseboat, a houseboat a rock,
a rock a wing. To one a song is a carol, to the other, an idea,
and the song drifts into crevices
as a lover speaks to a lover,
and at night the houses brighten and open in recognition,
and issue a density to the air, an uncounted weight
and a meaning that persists in letting itself be felt.
The sudden flares in the night light up around it,
the sudden flares in the day go unnoticed and sweeten the air,
the unspeaking smoke the aftermath of a thing’s good passage
as in undeveloped acres we feel attended to
not just by the flowers and fruits but by the small things that work,
the unrecorded insects, the temperature floating on temperature.
And your imaginary angels can ascend
when all this is fully operative, and their buoyancy
renovates the system and pumps in fresh air,
and plenitude reconfigures the lamplight, and plenitude
does something to the cold
and desire flits through the room, going to land somewhere private,
but can be cut open by laughter in company
or kept wrapped and secluded when seclusion is needed.
There continues to be a fresh page of day, with days behind it,
a temporary hostelry in the hello, in the asking what,
in glasses of water and the shared bench.
And there is sufficiency in the ugly divulgence
that wears its own face and occasionally takes a seat
at the uncovered table, during the uncovered years that staying makes.
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From The Palisades
Without my siblings around,
I bring my food home to eat alone.
It tires me
to see the staff
at the Panda Garden
in the lull
of four o’clock
folding boxes
under the shade tree of their language.
The place is well-lighted and clean
and discourages longing.
The fluorescent lights capable
of scalding my lowest, deepest recess.
*
I am not what I am to keep.
I consecrate this moment
by buying cookies.
*
I hate cookies.
I don’t want to move forward
in our ugly age. Hot messes
and myopia. A general plague of pond-staring, headphones,
annunciators, no image in the mind
of the suffering of others,
medievalists intent on charring
everything,
buildings, bodies of women.
Drapes walking down the street
answered by blunderbusses
and explicit trash
and bad grammar
thrown up and mistaken
for charm.
A scarf keeps the head on.
Dirt keeps the manuscripts down
in the ground, newness sets them afloat, invisible in air.
Unsuitable adjectives dribble at speed
out of broadcasts. No more seeds sown at depth,
the newbies are overengineered and wedge two fingers, stooge-style,
into the eyes. Exploring the limits of synaesthesia,
the pundit conjures noise enough
to discolor the documentary photographs.
His lovely assistant enlarges them, presses your nose
to the grains of white and black,
a lesson in abstract painting.
It is important
to do a fan dance
memorize the jingles
and then drive to the mall.
Otherwise you will trigger
the final conflagration.
And what about the threat
of everyone having to wear leotards all the time?
Oh futuristic vision, don’t abuse me so.
*
Everything is going out. Everyone is going out.
I constantly want to go in
a little further.
But feel that the outward look might be healthier.
So what happens is I fidget
at the tavern
and have the brief pleasure
of kissing little known men
on the cheek
and examining a new specimen of roughness
as I take my leave
politely, plebeian and carnal.
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