by Connolly Ryan

Amen to the oddities and obstacles
making ticklish work of love.

Our hovel has now a culvert
and for this we bathe anon.

You till the soil so that our noon
visits at the sill are seldom static.

Your rose voice keen and clear
as any bell too sonorous to be.

Our shape is one of many
Irish sorrows drawn from bog-light.

In your timorous camisole
my ancestry of resistance melts at last.

How softer and longer than imagery permits,
your legs and arms and breadth of your parted lips!

Missing from my life is the meaning of diligence
and the sweat unique to toiling land: only in metaphor

does my industriousness dwell—muscles idle save the gliding
salvation of my palms across your sweet and clement acre.

Soon smallish faces all ragged and fine:
the three wee ones we all but created.

God’s hand and nature’s feet:
sources of our measured fortune.

One day, melded in solitude abroad, perhaps in Wales
or Pleiades, all the plaintive quarrels we’ve weathered,

all the little perforated betrayals we’ve forged and endured,
will evanesce into the periphery ,and the lone given we’ll share

is that our vows have wholly evolved; and the sole sound we alone will know
is the intimate stir of our wedding-day bells, tinier and rounder than ever.

Connolly Ryan was born in Greenwich Village, New York in 1967. He is currently a professor of literature at University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he was thrice a finalist for the Distinguished Teaching Award. His visceral and witty poetry has been published in various journals including Bateau, Ditch, Umbrella, Satire, Scythe, Slope, Meat For Tea, Pannax Index, Satire and Old Crow. He is also a multiple Pushcart nominee. He has two finished manuscripts: Fort Polio and The Uncle Becky Chronicles.