Harebells, and: Lamentation
Rent from DeepDyve- Harebells, and: Lamentation
Harebells
How the mind drifts, a boat at sea.The flower capsules nod, blue as sea.
Beds, as rafts, pillows as plump clouds.Nothing at dusk distinct, easy to see.
At night we go down, down, two to a raft.What vortex, what spinning, carried out to sea.
“I would go anywhere with you,” he said to me.Unloosed, the planet shimmied, its surface all sea.
Then through the night, into the net of day—hours marked on a grid, 1, 2, 3, graded A, B, C.
Into the garden under oaks, lilies, harebells.The loop of a tongue, hummingbird, makes a c.
In lapping at nectar, it resembles a cat—In flying, the gnat. With all, I start to see. [End Page 135]
Lamentation
On the phone we exchange night visions of her,our departed red-headed sister. In Dan’s lucky dreamshe tells him “good work,” patting his hand.
In mine, she’s a head lying on the floor, a thing the dogsniffs until I jerk the leash. Jean scrubs carpet:“We’re divvying up silverware. Want some?”
In another dream, I walk the street, our old neighborhood,asking for alms, hand held out at the Torbas’—alwaysso kind—like trick or treat, souling, eve of All Souls.
Thus does so much become ash, her wishes, too,like ash, all the smudges on our foreheadsthose long-ago Wednesdays, when we knelt
devout in earnest, not knowing yet in churchthose weekday mornings before school, just whycoffins were there, and why we sang. [End Page 136]
Patricia Clark is poet in residence and professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. Author of four volumes of poetry, Clark’s latest book is Sunday Rising. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and has also appeared in the Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand. Recent work appears in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, and Plume.
