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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611860689 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2013 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 100 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.80(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
SUNDAY RISING
POEMSBy PATRICIA CLARK
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Patricia ClarkAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-068-9
Chapter One
Risen from the UnderworldArranged on slabs of sedimentary rock, rough-edged,
beige-gray with umber streaks,
circle of three figures sitting upright, holding knees in postures of
deep concentration as though facing
each other over a glittering pool or a campfire,
finding contemplation in its flames.
Gray silvered stainless steel letters form their
human husks—heads, necks and backs, shoulders, arms.
I imagine them risen up, like smoke, from the underworld,
journeying here to pause, immobile, as though to instruct us in some
kindred wisdom—
like knights whose questing days have gone, heavy chain-mail
armor exchanged for lighter stuff worn now as skin.
Not minding, they hunch without faces, mouths or eyes,
one indistinguishable from the other two.
Perhaps they form a group of three muses—
quirky figures come to applaud eff orts at speech,
raw tries at understanding, while clouds go whiffing through the
alphabet.
Stay seated here for eons in a green meadow,
trusting your own sweet time, they off er up,
until thoughts and sentences swirl together from
verbs, nouns, articles, particles.
Whoever they might be, uptilted on floes of Spanish stone,
xeno-shapes posing quietly together, do they seem to
yearn toward each other? Voices of those gone are drift ing,
zigzagging through, a rough music laced with cicadas, grackles,
flies.
Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil
Two banks, one golden, one green,
and in the center, the town
ahead, with a spire needling up,
a puncture into clouds,
and vague suggestions
of industry—buildings, smoke, and noise.
What I love along the bank are the skiff s
drawn up, five or more
at the golden side, the first boat
a bright russet like a horizontal flame
on water,
the next two mauve, one a sailboat,
one not.
The ochre-gold spills down from the cottonwoods,
pouring under the hulls,
entering the river with the same
intensity of burning
we see in life at its peak,
or life with the flame
threatening to go out.
In a month the trees will be masts
bare as the boats,
the man we know, ill with a fatal brain tumor,
will be gone—the Grand River
burnished with ochre and red
as the Seine is,
cooling air hinting at winter's knives.
One bank green in the painting,
green going away,
and the river placid, calm—
in the center of it—
the flowing never ceasing, rhythm of moon,
sun, the turning earth, pulling it outward,
eternal, restless, to the maw of the sea.
Oscine
Singing tribes, from hidden perches, from stems
and blossoms—honeysuckle, trumpet vine,
clematis—from a cottonwood's high branch
or the top spire of the white pine,
this warbling, crooning, cooing.
Seldom from the ground, from a low place—why
is that? Some fasthold with security,
safety, a haven—or something about shade, semidark,
coolness, looking out
and then to lift one's voice, here.
From the ecotone, edges, margins, trees into field,
lawn into hem of the woods,
riverine bank, creek, tree limb,
from the tree's dark trunk, rain-slick,
from the leaf's umbrella-shade.
Song to braid this new day or darkening gloom,
notes to send out, testing what the voice
can do—trills, legato, runs and rasps,
rattle of tongue against palate, mix of ecstasy,
elegy, sound into art.
Tomorrow Marks Six Years
A stone for breakfast.
Wintry walk with the dog
who bounces no matter what.
Later some few hours,
book in hand, lamplight pooled.
She's on my mind tonight, still.
Scrabbling for a piece
of her—five daughters grabbed
and clawed. I've got her bad foot.
Someone's caught her hands,
one sister held her heart.
I'm trying to admire
bunion, hammer toe.
A gift from her to me—
to take, treasure, and to hold.
Slippers, bedtime moves.
My right foot matches hers.
Mother bear leaves tracks in snow.
Aeromancy
Sundog, torrential rain,
ring around the midnight moon
Columnar light, once in minus
temps, flurries of snow:
headlights of cars shone odd,
straight up
Moisture that creeps into pages,
photographs, bones of ancestors
at Ellsworth Cottage,
Gull Lake
From these I predict—we, too,
will pass away,
perhaps without remembrance—
consider the example
Zora Perkey here, writing her name
on a book's flyleaf—
putting a line near a word
in the margin
This leaf pressed in—clover?
Here to mark a kiss?
Remember your own first—
then turn, let's smooch, and take
ourselves to the pillow-soft bed
to float, frolic
like unpredicting clouds
Winter Nests
Study their look aloft , leaf piles, stick and twig
laid down as lattice for a base, then stem upon stem
of leaves fastened and layered in together, not glue,
staple, or tape but interlock of twig and leaves,
edge and notch, heaped at a stout limb snag, some
cracked, molded, bent, some interlain with fluff ,
down of breast feather or blossom, frayed catkins a bird
tugged inch by inch from the yard waste heaped
out back behind the shed where a pile mounds up,
useful to robin, crow, or red-tailed hawk, not spring
dwellings for hatching eggs, warming them, raising
a clutch but dark splotches, large, in a blasted
bare oak for a storm shield, a blizzard house when
it's this arctic, frigid—half dead landscape seared below.
Energy Economics
"We balance on a ray of light and an oxygen molecule."
—Bernd Heinrich
I want to wake up beyond the lowering sky—
it muddies my heart, clouding who I am,
I want to extrapolate, extend and exclaim—
this is a day, this may be the richest
Friday of my life,
I want meals al fresco, wine aerated and silky,
I want the blowdowns in the woods to stand back up,
rise on their roots and walk,
If I want that orange again, black and orange flashing,
is that to want oriole or to hope for cardinal,
not to mention tanager?
I want the great blue heron to let me linger nearby,
allowing me to lie down under its wingspan—
When I want sunspecks, the sky stays milky, if I want cloudy,
it drift s to stark blue clear—
I want the dream undreamed, the one where my sister turns,
slipping her arm through his, and never comes back,
her complaints true and loud, but forgetting
admixtures of love—
I want building up, motives unmixed and straight
as tree trunks can ever be—
I want flights cross-country, my West brought home again,
I want more and yet more of it—mapwise, riverwise, Puget Sound—
I want salt and the water-licked shore, drift wood,
mountain slope heartbreaking, rugged,
sure, unbending stone.
Plane of Last Scattering
The image repeats, back and back in threaded time
like a hall of mirrors, a spinal column ascending,
regular, unbending, proud standard of cartilage, bone,
disc to lead us up and up. Then a flood of wheaten
gold pouring in, a groundwater carrying saffron, a hint
of crimson, palest daffodil cup blonde and waving
in sun. These might be the notches enabling us to climb
out of ourselves—and so, hand over hand, the path.
Tracery of bird flight, not mallard or heron straight
but with the woodpeckers' evading, curvy, up, down, up,
though still direct from point A to B. Abundant sheer
pleasure of repetition, the day come again—old friend—
to serve us. If learning how to live were simple flight—
or the magical extension of wings curving to cup air.
Ravine Goddess, August
She crooned, low, above the fetid smell
left by skunk overnight, then the notes
smoothed out, creamy, any ragged edges
disappearing, dissolved by rhythm, sound,
creek riffles moving downstream—though hurt
could still be heard, angling in the way a bur
catches by one prong, hanging on to fabric of shirt
or jeans—not easy to pry off , you'll try to shake
it without any luck. In the dog's hair, it works up
to a snarl, rat's nest, tangle you will have to
cut out with scissors. And always the most tender
of places—notch behind the ear, foreleg, rump
or belly hair close to the animal's sex. So try
the muzzle method—nip it out, lave with a wet tongue.
Quebrada
If the ground is torn, pebbled, cracked, showing a breakup
of ground has occurred, one leading to a rupture of landscape,
horizons, passes, this is quebrada. Do you hear
the lament crackling through its syllables? Oh my lost
footing, my sister, see how fissure-like all my ravines
have become. Where a mountain stream might break out
of a canyon or gully, quebrada the land at its source.
At one family's beginnings, five girls and only far later,
the twin boys, a last boy, the breaks. Then years of splitting,
separating, the centrifugal whirling away to a state
of entropy or call it heat death—though for a time,
no one saw the country beyond. The ground goes on quaking,
trembling, as though giants trod here. Our parents down,
deadfall trunks prone along the creek, stripped gray, bare.
Anti-Love Poem
Sometimes you want to love the person across
the room, the one glancing up from his book
with a faraway gaze, saying "if I hadn't met X,
if he hadn't written a letter for me, then you
and I wouldn't be here." Part of me refuses
to bite, won't hitch myself to his sweet misty-eyed
mood. Someone today needs to haul up a box
from the basement, start lift ing each ornament
off the Christmas tree. Before the holiday,
he lay ill with a cold—if I hadn't decorated the tree
we wouldn't have to remove fragile balls or lights.
If he weren't sitting across the room, I wouldn't
need to soft en my heart, look up to find his glance.
I could live in a fortress, behind stout walls.
How else to be human? How else to be saved?
My Mother's Feline Companion
It filtered back to me, her habit of TVs left on
blaring in empty rooms, one upstairs, one down—
talk radio, too, droning in the bedroom or bath, I think
it showed how far she had traveled in this world
to possess so many appliances, speaking ones,
at that—and what if you suddenly had to pee,
not wanting to miss what the pet therapist
advised about talking to your dog or cat,
telling them right out, plain, "I'll be gone
three days but Joey will come in to feed you."
My mother collapsed, that electrical slump,
because her cat died a few days before, let's admit it,
the one named Boy George because of errors made,
early on, with gender identification. White furred thing,
scrawny, sunken in, the two were compatriots to the end.
I want to go back, these many years later,
to the lobby where my mother fell on her face—
prow of her nose hitting first. No way to go.
I cushion her fall, angel of that Tacoma morning,
laying her down somewhere sweetly cushiony
with the cat—last breaths taken on the air together.
Wreath for the Red Admiral
A ragged morning with a tattered wing
like the red admiral yesterday's breeze
carried into the back garden
up from the ravine, up from a sheltered spot
it had found in sunlight where it was contemplating
warmth by basking in it.
The season two weeks ahead of itself, farmers
worried about the cherry crop—in orchards, they speak
like painters, "pink too early."
How we waited all winter for sun, warmth,
to return, as hungry for it as we were for meat,
for bread, for each other—
common here, not migrating as far as the monarch,
the red admiral emerges any time of year—
from a tree-high burrow hole, borrowed,
or from an inch-thick space under cottonwood bark.
Admire its black wings edged with red-orange bands—
white scallops on the tips.
I want to learn, living, how to be ragged on the wing
before another, loving the sun in each fiber and cell, not
hiding where it's torn.
After Franz Marc's The Red Deer (1912)
The apocalyptic future the artist saw long ago
shudders behind headlines in summer 2010—
red deer, necks snaking up to heads
sculpted finely, black noses and coal dark eyes—
white throats, bellies blushed with a smudge
bluish gray, otherwise downy and pale.
And the river's bloodied where they stand—
what will they drink? They cannot sip fiery
rouged water, wading there, eating the palms
or Solomon's seal bending along the bank—
I grow frightened by the pale looming ghosts,
eyeless, icy cold, in the background—
my nightmare lurks there, dead, denuded world
that we created with our waste, our greed.
Elegy for Wilma
Along the river in November, thin red canes bend,
bramble of some berry I can't identify.
Dark brown pods, half a finger's length,
burst open to show white filaments,
each carrying a nugget at its tip, frail cargo,
half of them gone on the wind.
I notice how each plant finishes the year,
milkweed, motherwort, everlasting pea.
My friend gone on a journey south, down through
Ohio fields, to comfort her twin sister must sit,
by now, at her deathbed, touching warm skin
of a hand that matches her own, both half
of a split egg some seventy years ago—
as the room fills with music, light,
then grays, thickening, only to drain of dark,
come dawn, then starting the cycle again.
Can the native plants along the river, grasses too,
daylilies, tell us anything of foreboding?
When the northeast wind blows, skidding across water,
they bend, and papery capsules crack, quite
predictably, along the seams, rattled seeds
spilling to earth, not knowing the harder part
of winter's coming. They ready for it as they can,
with dispersal, needing no word for it.
Chapter Two
Until It Speaks
Maybe my ears are made
mostly for reasons of symmetry,
balance like the way I feel
about rivers. You can't really
get them to speak to you
with a short acquaintance.
If you walk there on a first
or second try, notice
frogs taking leave of the bank
exclaiming something in frog
language, maybe "eek!"
And you check out a blue
rowboat pensive as a
lover moored and forlorn
at a landing. Walked half
a mile, nothing yet
spilled into the ears, wrought
into words. For starters,
you have to be willing to step
into the long grasses, beyond,
to pass the soothsayer's
maison, recently abandoned
upon her death, to go there
again at dawn, then after dark
to the Garonne's banks. What did
you say you were willing
to do? Think a year
or more. Think learning
a new palette of riverine
words. There is one
dictionary for its dialect,
left open at the soothsayer's
desk, a pencil mark
in the margin at the word
raiment. Isn't it how
we dress our indifference?
As though anyone were coming
strolling along to be fooled.
Rocks and Minerals
I stood as sure of him
as stone, as gravity, as
white oak tree trunk eighty feet
up in the yard, solid,
I called him when others
named him air, cloud, pine
needle cluster fragile, wisp
of seed blown from a milkweed,
flower of chocolate joe-pye
weed, dandelion. Should
never have slept sure of him
as sun touching forearm skin
after winter's length, as pillow
for my sore head. Others
warned but I thought no,
not him, not me, this
substance is feldspar,
epidote, limestone,
even better—dolomite.
Instead, pussy willow, snowmelt,
sandstone worn by
water, he cannot stay
true to season, lover,
friend. The gypsum mine
I climbed down into, late
summer, gaped wide halls
in some parts, others
narrow passageways where
we had to stoop, slog through water
and muck before coming
out, a few of us still bent over—
I had worn the wrong boots,
smooth soles with no tread—
and, thank the moon, a few
others held me up, I would
have gone down flat.
Tent Caterpillars
Terrible to look at them closely
through gauzy webbing,
how they writhe and twist,
a jumbled mass, squirming,
faceless, mouthparts moving, chewing—
are they eating the excretions
from others in their nest?
Sometimes men seize on a gem,
an idea of burning them out
with a gas-soaked rag held aloft
like a torch on a long pole—
the whoosh as the rag lights, an awful
purse-shaped bag of flame
blackening as the insects
ignite, consumed.
Kill the infestation but not
to light the shed—its wood
so crackling dry it wouldn't take
much, the sun's rays concentrated
on a nailhead heating up, spontaneously
combusting the nearby slats,
crumbling brown boards.
And the woods themselves, not to
stumble, toe caught on Virginia creeper,
ankle turned on a leaf pile or log,
not to drop the pole, or let this
caterpillar nest-fire drop straight down,
liquid melt setting duff , mounded oak leaves,
deadfalls, last year's Christmas tree ablaze—
and if you do—the quickness with which
it catches, runs, blows up to the treetops—
lighting them. How many nightmares
of fiery extinction, this purge to destroy
a spreading pest but rescue the cottonwood?
How many visions of a thing burned clean,
the mass destroyed, what's left made
beautiful by riddance, a scouring flame?
Near Paradise, Michigan: Crushed
Whatever RV or motor home this once was
it lies crumpled now
like a piece of stiff white paper
with aqua window shutters
its roof gathering the pine's needles and cones
with each wind gust
making a soft bed
for mourning doves or a nesting wren.
What has crawled inside to snooze?
Consider the ant, the vole,
the striped chipmunk who likes company.
Virginia creeper goes twining its way
around axle, tires, CV joints,
tie rods, sway bars, bumper and latch.
Cinnamon fern now waves its fronds
against floorboards, deck, against walls
broken and bent by a storm's blowdown
branches and thick trunks.
Who were the humans driving off to explore
together in this home on wheels
spinning and humming down the highway?
When the nor'easter kicks up across the meadow
sometimes a woman's voice sails out
clear as a bird, then a man's voice braids in—
a song about a valley, ravine, meadow, creek,
celebrating a river, or a rocky shore, hands
rowing them in, hands crossing a salt-stained bow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SUNDAY RISING by PATRICIA CLARK Copyright © 2013 by Patricia Clark. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
I.
Risen from the Underworld 3
Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil 5
Oscine 7
Tomorrow Marks Six Years 8
Aeromancy 9
Winter Nests 10
Energy Economics 11
Plane of Last Scattering 12
Ravine Goddess, August 13
Quebrada 14
Anti-Love Poem 15
My Mother's Feline Companion 16
Wreath for the Red Admiral 17
After Franz Marc's The Red Deer (1912) 18
Elegy for Wilma 19
II.
Until It Speaks 23
Rocks and Minerals 25
Tent Caterpillars 27
Near Paradise, Michigan: Crushed 29
Air Like a Sea 31
Near Paradise, Michigan: Brown Cabin, Roof with a Green Stripe 32
Rockweed, Knotted Wrack, Dead Man's Fingers 33
Viewshed 35
Poem Ending with a Line from Tranströmer 36
Late Letter to Hugo 37
Helleborus Orientalis 38
Wood Not Yet Out 40
Kingston Plains 41
By Clear and Clear: Riverside, Midday 42
After Hiroshige 43
Heron, in Sunlight 45
Burial Underwear 46
III.
Olentangy Elegy 51
IV.
Sunday Rising 63
Cento 65
Ghosts That Need Consoling 66
Missing 67
Depressed by a Gray Mood on Tuesday, I Step Up and See a Sparrow 68
If Riptides Were a Gateway 69
Zodiacal Light: A Dialogue 70
Near the North Sea 72
It Was Raining in Middelburg 74
Botanical Beliefs 75
Tell Me Again Why Western State Hospital for the Criminally Insane Should Not Frighten Me 76
Psalm to Sing on a Frozen Morning 77
Where Pilgrims Pass 78
River Villanelle 79
Across Barbed Wire 80
Math, Architecture 82
Stowaway in the Arugula 83
Exile Song 85
Acknowledgments 87
Notes 89