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    Picking Up The Bodies
    Picking Up The Bodies
    Picking Up The Bodies
    Ebook147 pages39 minutes

    Picking Up The Bodies

    By James F. Connolly

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    About this ebook

    “James Connolly is a poet of courage and craft. He tells secrets. He tells the truth. He is the most honest man in the village. With clarity and integrity, he speaks of alcoholism, madness, suicide, abuse, fallen priests, and grandfathers and revolutionaries. Above all, he writes about the rituals of death, for he is intimate with these rituals. James Connolly grew up in a family of undertakers; his narratives about this way of life and death are, in a word, unforgettable, a muted cry of pain and compassion for both the living and the dead. Six Feet Under this isn’t. It is, however, poetry. Connolly writes poems jeweled with sparkling images and finely wrought diction. His eye is exact—he seems to miss nothing—and he refuses to look away. He also refuses despair: These are ultimately poems of bruised survival and indelible memory, as in the poem “Last Summer,” where a girl who escapes drowning walks the beach calling to her dead companions."
    —Martin Espada

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFomite
    Release dateMar 23, 2020
    ISBN9781937677893
    Picking Up The Bodies

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      Book preview

      Picking Up The Bodies - James F. Connolly

      Drawing on Life

      Drawing on Life

      Poems

      Mason Drukman

      Fomite

      Contents

      An American Family

      An Eye for Taste

      Dressed to Kill

      Uncle Harry

      I Know What You Mean, Ivan Karamazov

      Bob

      I’m Driving Dave Dellinger

      The Lady

      Snow Geese in the Berkeley Pit

      Things Fall

      One Eye for Survival

      The Freelancer

      The New Old Math

      Political Theory (for Matt Stolz)

      Incubation

      Father, 1989

      Red Car

      Gin

      Sally

      Balance Rock

      The Baseball Lesson

      Who’s Afraid in the Dark

      Safe Havens

      Come to Jamaica

      She Could Have Been Right

      Switchback

      On the Sundial Bridge

      Way After Sappho

      Isidor Wright

      Loma Prieta

      Birth of the Blues

      Shipping News

      Weekend Pass

      He Didn’t Come

      In my dream thoughts

      Kidneys

      The Watsu Water Massage

      Norman Jacobson

      Awakening

      Ice

      The Lobsterman

      Seeing/Unseen

      Why Didn’t You Call?

      P.S. Do You Read Me?

      Anomie

      Whose Woods

      Rainy Day Rumblings

      David Carlson’s Quantum Quartet

      ALL

      Goodbye

      . . . for Sore Eyes

      Still Life

      The Grief Group

      A Conversation

      Mechanical Disadvantage

      Getting in Touch

      Once My Moon

      Note

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      About the Artist

      For Sam

      I miss you.

      An American Family

      the white birch sits where it belongs

      snugged within its shining family

      on the shore of the Merrimack

      a sister tree stands on the opposite coast

      blazing whiteness against

      the uncertain red of cold-snapped sequoias

      the Billerica summer house

      a mordant aroma of faded woodwork

      emptied rooms in dead-leaf brown

      the Miami daughter

      who can no longer stand

      sits in her wheelchair

      under a beetling

      waiting for help

      her New England sister

      leans out toward the parking lot

      of her subsidized apartment

      her Chevy wagon

      buried in snow

      the brother in Georgia

      reclines on his sectional

      both feet on the hassock

      flipping the remote

      trying to remember

      the father who smoked

      two packs a day

      sometimes three

      windows closed tight

      in his cobalt De Soto

      baby brother

      younger than he used to be

      dials long distance

      no message left

      and no one rings up in return

      mama’s gone missing

      she stands in the woods

      by a dying birch

      unable to see

      through cross-hatched glasses

      the eldest son

      refuses to be in this poem

      an undomesticated redwood

      blockades his back yard

      obstructing our view of his life

      An Eye for Taste

      like a platypus under water

      he eats with eyes shut

      the better to focus on the essence of the fare

      every crumb of Panko

      every shred of saffron

      every molecule of rose water

      and after dessert

      dilates on what he’s ingested

      takes pleasure in listing the ingredients

      in seldom missing one or

      mistaking one for another

      his eyes are also closed when he sings

      an Irish tenor with red hair wearing dark glasses

      at a Sears Roebuck upright

      crooning not the cèilidh melodies

      or step-dance ditties of the Old Sod

      but the ballads of McCartney and Lightfoot and

      medleys of folk tunes and klezmer laments

      in the ICU his eyes never close

      as far as anyone can see

      alone of the nurses

      he wears shades indoors

      against regulations

      the only male on the shift

      a giant among women

      his large body moving nimbly his voice

      a humming accompaniment to the

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