From Chris: Mark Conway’s poems refuse to sit still, even when, or perhaps especially when talking about stillness. The double colons and forward slashes that punctuate these lines seem to me to operate like the stutter or dip of a manual transmission shifting into higher gear, propelling the poem forward. The poem below is about memory (and a particular memory) and how it remains kinetic within its stasis “in the time of the mind,” which shares the mutability of dreams, where rain becomes silk and silk, skin, where the brain is a “pulsing / pink worm that pulls in / all it sees.” In some sense, this poem is playing on loop, and I think you might do well to read it that way.
in the orchard
*
in the time of the mind
memories fall
like regimes ::
lamplights glance off the streets of the lost districts / varnished
by epochs of rain
remember it all / so / vivid
and dim
remember _____the night
when rain turned
to silk and the silk changed to skin
in the shank of the orchard
just the width
of a soul?
rumors of futures were blown down
like clouds dripping
from trees;
we stayed and lived –
for a while –
still as a house
**
or start instead –
later / after
the fall – the snow studded
with starlings and half-
rotted fruit –
the slick floor of the orchard seethed
with fog wrung
from the snow:
the child was there / the one
to unfold – inside
the red raincoat –
with two telling buttons left open…
we know she’ll appear /
stunned / when the apples turn green
when the snows turn to mist
arrayed in the white
flesh of the meat / riveted in
by black polished seeds –
ultra-trees of trees reduced
to the size of a fist:
orchard come down
***
remember with skin – with the back
of your hand greasy
as sin_____ remember
the snow: the blank
and the roar
the field erased by looking
too deep
remember_____with the hole
in your head / stuffed
with whipped cream and wood /
home to the brain – the pulsing
pink worm that pulls in
all it sees and excretes
what it dreams : : remember
your skin when it took in the breath
of the tree / wheezing
in spring / exhaling white petals
and the boys at the quarry
who tore the girl’s
clothes as she swam / who tore
the girl’s eyes as she gurgled
and choked
remember her eyes
looking at you
****
forget the girl
at the slag-hole /
the girl made of stone and black waves –
look instead at the child
through the holes
in your face / lie through
your eyes down into
her head
say it’s not you
who needs
to take it all back
it’s not you who pulled
the girl down
as she strangled and
churned / say
what you say: it’s never
been you
_________________________________________
Mark Conway is currently completing a third book of poems with the working title in the infinite head of wheat. Other poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Slate, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, Iowa Review, Boston Review and Bomb.
