How Dumb the Stars

Francine Conley

Francine Conley’s poems are gifts of substance and truth wrapped in tantalizing metaphors. Conley is thoroughly at home in the quirky mysteries of experience where there are many meanings, often best spoken in parables. Light, she seems to say, is found in embracing – rather than dissecting – the mystery. “Why do you drill the dark for answers,/ …drive around/and around in search of a street/whose path, like a perfectly peeled apple,/might explain what we think, what is?” Conley gives us rich moments of connection and understanding, but these are not so much captured as revealed. “Unintentional as wind chimes we struck…./”It was then the air grew/greater than both of us and sang,….” The air of Conley’s poems sings for the reader, too, and offers many satisfying intimations of “what is.”

Francine Conley completed a Ph.D. in French literature and Theatre at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Besides being an actress and director of multiple productions, she has adapted and performed her poetry into four one-woman shows, Cocu Couple(1992), Whole People (1995), Truth or Dare! (1998), and The Purse Project (2000). She has also been the recipient of a variety of awards, including the George B. Hill and Therese Muller Creative Writing Award (1996), and a Fulbright grant to write and do theatre work in France (1998-9).

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Excerpt

Where I Come From

Where is that thread of gold in me,
the oh-so-beautiful, the spun
clockwork of the organ player,
a lost pier that remembers
each morning’s twisted mist?

When was my face stolen,
body hollowed into reckless shapes,
pitiful whistle, each eye filled
with the suddenness
of a wish, an eyelash blown

off a wet finger tip, a hand clung
to the earth, the past?
Born like a flag to bear disguise–
Where I come from:
a face vanishing from a mirror.