The Rest Is Silence: Poems by Frances Garrett Connell

By Frances Garrett Connell

This eclectic selection of poems straddles decades, generations and continents and constitutes the stories collected by the author over a lifetime. The works reflect on the human condition, what the oral historian Studs Terkel called life and its uncertainties, loves exuberance and sad needs, births joy and deaths dark wounds, the comedy of communal days and the wearying tears of isolating night. Its language seeks to plummet the power of the communicated word, the fragility of understanding, and the frustrations of muteness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 19, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465329882

Frances Garrett Connell

Frances Garrett Connell is a former Peace Corps volunteer. She did her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the Afhgan village of Tashkurghan and its uses of literacy, The Authoring of Selves: Literacy and its Indigenous Forms in a Traditional Afghan Village. She has published a volume of poetry, (The Rest is Silence) and a novel (Down Rivers of Windfall Night) with Xlibris, as well as four books as part of her own oral history press, ARS (A Reminiscence Sing.), several dozen pieces in ssmall magazines and association publications. She has never returned to Afghanistan, but three sons and a husband keep her memories alive, teach her the meaning of time and of love, and nurture her desire to hear, heed and pass on the stories.

Book preview

Poems by Frances Garrett Connell

Image365.JPG

My Grandmother Gabriella Medora Kidd and Grandfather

Alexander Stephen Garrett 1920’s

Frances Garrett Connell

Copyright © 2003 by Frances Garrett Connell.

COVER PHOTO: My Grandmother and Great-aunt, Emma and

Ella Findeisen. Brenham, Texas, circa 1895.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

18255

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PART ONE

BLESSED BE THE TIE THAT BINDS

Impressionists on the Seine

Meeting Yeats in Galway

Crossing the Log at 47 at Sunset

The Second Addition to Culvert’s Chance

Brittany’s Menhirs

My Father Visits His Sister in the Sanitarium

Making Mounds

Saving Leona

Trucks of Childhood

Cat’s Cradle

Houses (to a 25th Anniversary)

If Your Grandpa Had Never Fallen . . . .

Upon Deng’s Invitation

Burying Rich People

Stomach Ache

Poetry Class

KATYDID WINGS

Babies in old Houses

Cricket Caught

Deer in the Snow

Forested Sanctuary, June 25, 1995

Animals

Excerpts from An Autumnal Will

Musing on the 17-year Cicada

Lila’s Children Dream

Marie’s Images in Brockton

Riddles

Voyages

Maya Angelou, January 21, 1992

Words

Storyteller

Stone Soup

The Hunter, the Dog and the Raven

Thomas Francis

DEATH SANDS

B.J. Chute (1913-1987)

once You Have Been There

Deathsand

Death Comes to the Archbishop

Floating Coffin

Mary Jan Bache (1901-1987)

Jeannie: 1945-1994

Dave’s Words

To the Traveler

To John on the First Anniversary of His Death

OTHER WORLDS

Burmese Postcards from 1908

Feeding a Kangaroo in Queensland

Afghanistan’s Revolution 1978

The Bent Knee

Connie’s Father’s Mother

Carnival Midway: Bloomington, Indiana

Clown Off-Duty

Japanese Landlady

Left Children

Elissa

A Poem in Which a Mystery is Alluded To

Tashkurghan, Afghanistan

Writing a Book of Memories for Marcia Bartley,

1940-1993

Teaching English to the Russians

To Weldon Kees (1918-1955)

Farewell to Tashkurghan

The Green Banana

Thomas, West Virginia

Writing a Letter to My Niece

Who Married into a Large French Family

Tibetan Monks Perform at National Cathedral

WHERE I WAS

A HUNDRED YEARS

Black Student Pharmacist Dismissed

Cain and Abel, January 1995

Ethics in America (1988)

Joe Clark’s High School

To Anthony Rose

Lenten Witness for Central America

Nader Duels Nuclear Industry

Detroit Speaks (1988)

Smuggled Mexicans Dead

Yo No Soy Nada

Patricia Schroeder: Second Thoughts (6/18/88)

Three Ways of Looking at a Bruise

Where I Was, A Hundred Years Less Silence

Dates

DERIVATIONS

After Rilke’s Herbsttag

After Philippe Jaccottet’s La Traversee

Womanly Windows

Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek

Against Womanly Cycles:

The Cultural Revolution

AFTERWARDS

Private Property, or Quarrel Because

He Doesn’t Get to Read Old Stories

Friday, A.M.

Whole Fight

Bedding

Years End with Sons

Day after Valentine’s, 1993

Naming the Tomatoes

Alone with the Planner

Him in New York, July 19, 1995

Winter Breaking

End

Afterwards

Return

Muse, too

Two

Ghosts

Sharing the Dead: Dec. 21, l987

Thanksgiving Day, 1985

Sorceress

A Week’s Quarrel

After The Therapy,

Before the Engagement

EARLIER DAYS

Brothers

A Brother, Deinstitutionalized

When John Married

Child Vine Hanging

English Teachers Past Musings

Could Your Money Have Saved This Family?

The Fireplace

The History of Uncle Walter’s Bad Leg

Workmen in our House

The Day She Was Born

Quarreling with a Seven-Year-Old

To The Head of the School: Sri Lanka

How Can We Be Kouchi Without Our Animals?

Trekkers

In the Dark Bends, Caution the Flowers

Mothers-in Law Meet over Friendship Cake

A Niece Downeast

October 23, 1962

Old Teacher-Poetess

Sick J.T.

Upon Sitting through the Seventh Hour

of a Course Called Curriculum and Instruction

in Higher Education

A Wedding

When We Were Young Visitors in the Country

Owls

PART TWO

MAMA’S PEOPLE

AND OTHER JOURNEYS

Great-Grandmother Franzeska Marek Findeisen

Revolving Autobiography

My Brother Hikes our Woods

The Lawyer on Trial

Reptilian Escapes

Dream

Eleanor’s Banyan Tree

Trio

Farewell to Uncle Walter

Mrs. Meesey

My Mother Meets Daddy’s Other Wife

Grandpa Ashorn Hears of Honey’s Death

Mr. Tiffany’s Geometry Class

Silence (for Peggy Fay)

Claire’s Lightening

I Watch My Husband Bury the Coffeepot

Anne-Sophie’s Tale

The Discussion About Where Mother Should Be,

Vol. V, No. 201

Sheets

When She Leaves Us

THE WINTER OF OUR

DISCONTENT: LAMENTS

Confession

Tom Takes Six Weeks Alone in Italy

Tack Room

Transformation

Lady in the Woods

Gridlock (two years before 9/11)

Whimsy After Georgia O’Keefe

A (Bad) Wife’s Tale

Modern Trips

Neighbor We Never See

Dismembering a Tick From My Belly

Betrayal

The Things that I Fear

THE GIFTS OUTRIGHT

A Letter from Loren Eisley

Math Prodigy (after Basarab Nicholescu)

Mencius

Parent-Teacher Conference

On Not Using Time Given

Ode to Sar-e-pul, Afghanistan

Ancient History

Scenes of Italy

While We Watched A Turn of The Screw

Torrean Starlake Chapter of the Navajo Nation

The Source and the Sorgue:

Firenze

Pigeons1

Fayum Portraits

Identifying Spring Wild Flowers

Bird Sanctuary at Assateague

Sea Caves in the British Virgin Isles

Our Sons Quit Playing Flute

Love Poem Thirty Year After

Meditation on Vermeer’s

Woman Holding a Balance

Bridges

After Walt Whitman

Clay

The Gift

LOVE LETTERS

Villanelle for Tom’s 53rd

Five-fifty A.M., October 28, 2002

In Defiance: Gineva de Benci

Bringing the Soul Home

Communion, Christmas Eve 2002

Fathers More Beautiful than Madonnas

Dark Matter:

To One Who Would Vanish into the Night

In Praise of Shadow

Indiana Highway

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This book is dedicated to Thomas Francis Connell,

with love and gratitude for all that was and is yet to be,

and to our sons

Brendan, Shawn and Gaelan.

Sometimes when I’m lonely,

Don’t know why,

Keep thinking I won’t be lonely

By and by.

—Langston Hughes

You are the victim ofthat Arabian storyteller that dwells inside

you and invents endless stories to fill the gaps between the books

you read, so that an unbroken wall may protect you from life.

But this time the story you’re telling yourself is really your own

story. True or invented?

How much is imaginary? Exactly where does it coincide with reality?

Mauriac: Maltaverne

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The poems which follow are but rarely based on actual events, and yet the people and the situations often are rooted in a reality which pervades the decades to which our lives alluded, more than in the daily rituals and records to which our lived years attest. The subjectsvary, both in intensity and resolve. In general, I have tried not towrite about my children, for they are their own creations, craftsmen and masters of their own days, far too precious and malleable for me to attempt to capture in a verbal creation. Yet sometimes, a ritual or a subject which has been their own takes on a life here. As to my husband, his role has been so central to my life, the catalyst and the cauldron, that even in my dreams he comes in forms I hunger after, but never quite taste. He has been the poet and teacher and lover of my life, the one who made the great voices of all time speak out of wounds of longing: Shakespeare, Yeats, Seferis, Cavafy, Webster, Thomas, and so many others. In him master crafted words reside unfathomably deep, and for the many times we have each plummeted the depth and shared them, I continue to thank him.

PART ONE

Delusions and Derivations

BLESSED BE THE TIE THAT BINDS

Image396.JPG

My sister Louise, brother John and me, Houston, TX 1952

Impressionists on the Seine

(To John, 1947-1996)

You were always in such a hurry,

scuffing soft ground to get moving,

hearing another clock tick,

squinting round eyes to make blues of green.

(What if we had sat at the table in

Renoir’s Rower’s Luncheon

posed in the space between archway

and water rippling, our skins taut, wine soft

the world blurred blue and luminous,

you sprawled cockily, the rower facing out,

the other small beside your heat, while I

a woman’s back, smile at you both

content to settle still and listen?)

At Sunday dinners you took the floor from everyone,

slamming down a fist to make a point, panting.

A puppeteer you pulled me on thin floating threads:

sneaking into the attic to show me mysteries

piled up under old sheets two weeks before Santa,

propelling yourself barefooted to the top of every fir tree

I short-legged scuttled to follow,

clawing up crayfish quick as a steam shovel

under ditches flooding chocolate-colored mud.

Frantically you stretched your 13-year old limbs

inside our Daddy’s shirts and trousers

acquiring manhood instantly in a weight of cloth.

You crossed the country on your thumb

sized up jail cells for runaways in Oklahoma

dissolved peyote buttons on dry saliva across New Mexico

scribbled seven reams of stories, then sent the pages flying

past prairie winds and Pacific city stops

before you legioned eighteen.

You raced through marriage to a Nebraska librarian

pausing once to catch college, in courses

like salt sprinkled on the wounds of your impatience.

(What if we’d paused in the pale wind

of some Grenouillere afternoon

sweaty effort incandescent light on bare arms

the painter readied to pastel words of hope,

your bold rower’s hands anchoring us

against the table whites, carafes sparkling red

to our faces, life never growing harder,

that water your only way,

each breath floating clear color?)

The medicines they finally gave you

slowed you down:

your thin boxer’s arms grew flabby,

legs that had raced bases to home runs

thickened, a hard torso ballooned.

Days and years you’d sit by the garden

cigarettes mounting beside mother’s

coffee grounds and spoiled vegetables

then be off pacing, demanding.

Or, stretched out

on your unmade bachelor’s bed

your head raced remembering,

creating Tahitian girls and kaleidoscopes

to wrap around your limbs, retired at 40.

(What place would you have gone to after that,

carrying away the comet of your fierce light

back over the river in a thin boat,

warm curve of your pants against wood,

sky filtering through lattices our presence

parted like your oars the water,

no shadows falling in this steadied noon

we, waiting there in still life,

the luncheon, always coming?)

You were always in such a hurry,

wouldn’t linger at either emergency room

that last night,

in dawn’s light rolled off the bed

to nestle the fleshy shell

of your quick self

on the floor seeking air,

your heart failing,

to climb as fast as a gymnast

into black death.

Meeting Yeats in Galway

Sturdy New York college girls turning twenty

knew better than to take a ride with two strange men

in that smoky kiln-scented Galway pub this side of morning,

but the yarn of their stories bound us shandy after ale

their velvet voices reeling out Yeats and Synge

like kingly cloaks against the blowsy bog beyond the village

when you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by

the fire

Oh, but sure we’d be giving you a ride. We know the place well.

Patrick’s fingers tucked me under arm and I was rising.

Time, it’s time, the patch-eyed owner called

as Susan’s long dress swirled below her knotted hair

skirting a path beside the road to their Mini-Morris,

too small for mischief, I drop a sigh with Susan

take down this book and slowly read and dream of the soft

look

Orange circles set the moon to swaying back and forth

behind Slieve Aughty Mountain like a search light,

Patrick’s eyes and lapping tongue surround me:

he talks of concierge in Dublin boarding houses,

student pranks in Wicklow, rolling hard cider barrels

down the wharf in splinters one lame Easter day,

of the Rebellion and his father’s folk holding out in Oranmore,

so we laughed and cried, into childhood and out that tunnel,

bogs bending where the road had ended, to turn in at the sea

and one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

On a hill above the harbor

they let us out to spend the night in a field

nervous we’d miss the dawn boat to Inishmore,

there are stars like tears and they tuck us in with heather,

fetch pillows from fallen megaliths to bring us into legend,

then vanish, two lank, thick-haired men home on holiday,

back to their families in time for morning mass.

All night the water pulsed against the cliff.

I hear it yet, as clear as wind that fingers this room’s window

and wonder what their eyes turn out to now, who

loved the sorrows of your changing face.

(Lines from Yeats’ When You Are Old)

Crossing the Log at 47 at Sunset

She looks ridiculous, the old-fashioned dress

swirling around, a sash flying

as she walks that log like a tight rope circus queen,

an imaginary parasol laboring to lift her bulk,

one foot put down, pirouetting,

fat fingers clutching the mothing air,

as a dog barks beyond the bank.

The boys watching from the other side,

where they’d scampered in seconds,

squirm to avoid her eye.

They cannot know,

as she floats back to the tight quick body

that clutched the sappy pine branches hand over foot,

to climb to the top of a young girl’s yard,

balanced on branches thick as giant torsos

under wispy canopies of green needling boughs.

She is again empress of the sidewalk,

equal to the moss-tossed oaks creaking

beyond the family’s brown shingled house,

scion of a yard that holds a jungled million plants,

and rises with vapors breathing camellias

caught in sweet pea vines.

Across the creek they’ve gathered up the rope swing,

sent it lopping over the water like a shaking tail,

their climbing fingers gather in the meadow, they dig up mud,

curl clay to balls, and pitch stones washed on shore to currents

bigger than a sleepy stream’s behind their hillside house.

Leaping from log to land, she joins their company.

The Second Addition to Culvert’s Chance

On February 9, 1742. . . a tract of land of400 acres called

The Second Addition to Culver’s Chance was surveyed for

Henry Culver’s son . . . and included all of what is now

Springbrook Forest. . . A mine was worked from 1882-1884

on the southwest side of the Northwest Branch . . . its shaft

entrance across from where Remington now meets Stonington

Drive.

The place I keep going back to clinches itself.

Wrinkled as an old handbag,

it snaps closed after I reach to find spare change.

We make this house above a buried mine shaft

every rain harvests thin-layered mica like glass,

rolls it down to merge with mud and sand

in folding ferns by the creek bed,

unearths its books and sheets of gray-green clarity

folded over on themselves.

Uncrackable, the glassy stone neither melts nor burns,

windows stoves and lamps,

stretches to a peephole for a furnace;

(calmly an aging figure peers through

mica layers to an inferno burning coal, the sister rock.)

It splits, but only one way.

At just our corner, where the streets join,

on this Wissahicken piedmont edge 500 million years ago

stone pushed up from an ocean floor.

Later tobacco planters leached the soil

until Friends brought guano so the dirt could bloom,

neighbors recalled chestnut trees turning fat palms to the rain,

their nuts sold along country roads before the blight,

and cracking ice to bag in burlap,

river trout who circled cold below in winter;

wild orchids’ brazen orange crowded lilies of the valley,

poplar trees towered over pointy laurel nosegays between

dogwood’s blood-red stains guarding shiny plump holly:

the forest cleared for strawberry farms,

the horse pastures staying past,

first cutting of tangled woods to build this house.

Ghosts of miners startle in ditches and pits

where old wagon ruts and dead end roads pencil lines

beneath our hard drawn asphalt streets;

when the trees sway, their sweat and cursing hovers

among four-horse conveys hauling the mined mica,

their dropped shoes rusty irons with thick-grown nails wash up

in patches of soil beside the pocketing stone.

Its brittleness lends it well to insulation and mixings.

Like an onion, you can peal one layer at a time.

(How many times must I tell you

I will not break?)

Brittany’s Menhirs

That day we stood

on the stone lip of the Atlantic

the wind tunneling our clothes,

we had raced from mussel strands

over highways lacing villages

that Bretons carved with