Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, by Geraldine Connolly

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room), by Pierre Bonnard (France). 1931.

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room)

It reminds me of my family.
Only half the table spreads beneath
the window: glass of wine, pyramid
of plums, pottery bowl and creamer
arranged next to a basket of bread.

You’d expect the whole table.
And why does the blue striped cloth
fold toward us as peonies scatter
along the wallpaper like firecrackers?
My mother sits there
in the shadows while Father
slumps in a chair, his face turned
away toward the window.

He’s grown tired of domestic
detritus, the artillery of leaves,
claustrophobic battles of mothers
and daughters among china platters.

Beyond the narrow room stretches
the storm cloud of his nearing death.
Soon the table will tip and crumble.
Death’s hand hovers over pears.

Geraldine Connolly

Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of three poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), as well as a chapbook, The Red Room (Heatherstone Press). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com

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