I threw out everything that didn't give me a spark
and hung all the whites on the table.
Greens and deep dirt browns and grays.

The sensory titillations of the day

entered each limb's phantom collapse and gait, tremor are you there?

See until you are gone and there is only what you are seeing.

Just trying that meant yesterday.

What to do today. Falls the shadow.



About this poem
"I was reading through one of the unlined, black-covered, artist sketchbooks I've scribbled in since I first began to write. The books are very messy, mostly fragments in all directions, but when I came upon these lines, they were all by themselves, on one page. I read the page and thought, 'That's a poem,' and then all at once the title came to me. This poem reminds me how companionable writing is, how it's always there, if you're patient enough, and remember to look for it."
-Gillian Conoley

About Gillian Conoley
Gillian Conoley is the author of "Peace" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014). She teaches at Sonoma State University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Gillian Conoley. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate