Picking Up The Bodies

By James F. Connolly

“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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Mar 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781937677893

Book preview

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