Category: Charlie Clark

by Charlie Clark

I am descended from a people

who used dictionaries

to wipe blood up off the floor.

If you think that’s insane,

look into your family tree.

If you don’t find that dragon

Columbus roiling in his gold

filigree, keep looking.

Someone set his neighbor’s

house on fire because

the neighbor would not

let him in the door. I am

descended from a people

who threw women into water

and when those women

turned into the spewing

towers of Hawaii, my people

ventured there off-season,

drenched in sunscreen,

their noses squinched up

at strange odors. I have

visited the cathedrals

they built to keep the memory

of those women at bay.

Their roofs are now all open

air, and I’m fine with that,

though it’s unfortunate

their makers couldn’t see them

like this, goats passing through,

birds shitting on everything,

because they could not have

looked any better new.

I am the fulcrum of a history

built on fear and best intentions.

I am the predecessor

of a people who know

scrubbing off the bird shit

will only accelerate decay,

yet they spend their mornings

arched up to it, whistling

every falling side wall clean.

I am the predecessor of a people

who will hold a bent stick

into the air and go walking

whichever way it leads—

a trick I pass down to let them

seem less lost. It is not a right,

though for them it will happen

like it were one: irrefutable,

brutal, god-given, free.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

Every five years my failure as a man gets weirder.

Once, in the woods and lost, I tried to track a trail of vapor home.

That was the seventh time I legitimately thought that I might die.

Another time, in Paris, was over a bar tab in a discothèque called Le Pélican.

After that I went home and read John Donne poorly.

He wrote from convolution into convolution.

He tried to say which is preferable, to be good or destroyed.

He preferred to be destroyed.

He did not write of pelicans.

Yet I read him poorly.

So in reading him I thought of pelicans.

How they hunt by an immense falling from the air.

How long they carry the dead around inside their mouths.

How they have no notion of their strangeness.

How they would be enviable if not for this:

They are fervent but without song.

That night I dreamed of a pelican named John Donne.

This is typical of my weirdness.

It fell upon our marriage bed.

I volunteered to be the one consumed.

I sat up inside the creature’s beak beside the many dead it hauled.

I tried to speak but its gullet swallowed every sound.

The dead there had devised a kind of pantomime.

I learned it soon enough.

Its every word meant grieve.

Grieving, alive but dead, I thought of my sweet wife.

With her in mind, I found the deadest dreadful body there.

I tore a length of its dried flesh free.

Upon that flesh I wrote these words.

With some finger bones I bored a hole through the pelican’s low beak.

When we passed above our home again, I spat the message through.

It darted, ardent as an insect, into my wife’s sleeping ear.

She woke then, not knowing what I’d done.

My song thrived inside her; humming always, though I was gone.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

To their bones it must seem like strange wind.

He’s listened with them for three years now.

The only effect it’s had is that when the songs cut off

he hears a ringing rather than their murmur.

It’s that much less rebuke. He thought it would

move through the herd more like when he drives

among them a few bars faster than he should,

headlights like wet blotter shining on their hides.

Only in the low and whirl of such privacy

does he watch his hands become two thick pistols

giving back to heaven its little bolts of thanks.

Walking through the pasture, the fact that

he knows people who claim to see loved ones’

eyes stare back continues to confuse him.

He stares and sees the colors of the uniforms

it was, in a past he did not disclose on his application,

too often his duty to make clean. He stares and sees

the shale of rainclouds, or smoke rising from some

far grass patch whose location is vague but no less

difficult for him to believe in beyond the rudiments

of its burning. He stares and sees the illiterate

that for three years now he has dreamed of,

sees the color of his tongue as he receives his death

papers, papers he understands immediately

even though he cannot read, because they are a king’s

words, meaning they have been delivered

sealed in a gaudy, wine-dark wax, meaning they are

already everywhere, meaning you can burn them,

you can burn the paper or the vellum or whatever

they arrived on, you can burn that iota of

the kingdom and still its words will go on ringing.

Each night for three years now he has dreamed

of the illiterate doomed by the king’s pleasure.

Each morning for three years now he has woken

to flanks of stale cornbread, these farting cows,

and this music that he loves. This love, he caws,

slapping the closest one, seeing how well

this, the latest, most-benign form of hardness

he has tried on works. After three years

of appraising it, he knows it never will. Three years.

Bleak to bleak to bleak. Bone to bone to bone.

He believes his kingdom will never deliver

him from these cows. Their days together

comprise layers of gray, wet grass and his high

mockeries. As loudly as he can make it

go, syllable after syllable, the word re-

spect tattoos the air as though the air were an eager

wall of flesh. Call it pleasure. In the flesh of the ear

this breath that lingers even as it vanishes.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin
Find more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

Summertime is a castle of long white grass.

Anything can make me think of you.

Squares of sunlight burning on my chest.

Hoarders marathons close-captioned at the gym.

At night, when I’m counting the books that I can bear to part with,

something I do

under the auspices of cleaning house,

nothing ever actually leaves the shelves.

Words are made to accumulate, like plaque in one’s ventricles.

Even the idiot who runs my heart knows this.

Solitary man, he won’t say it but he lives for your company.

The hope is that he dies of it.

*

Cut me some slack. I don’t have a death wish,

however much I may circle back to it

as a subject. As a subject, it’s tied with love, painters,

Replacements songs, and the garbage I see when biking.

Life is full of candy wrappers bleached white under the sun.

I still mistake half of them for butterflies drunk in gutters.

English is the only means I have to show this.

Caravaggio, in hell, must not be too jealous. He had oils and Italy.

Light, therefore, let him render the unspeakable.

Almost every morning I stare directly at the sun.

Reeling, I go, blind beneath its radiance.

Kicking each pale letter of the world in place.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

I am thankful my ears

merely ring, that they are

not two pilfered slips

of marble discovered

in the glove compartment

of the newest employee

of the Museum of Ruin,

whose fetish to speak

softly into stone he did not

disclose on his application.

If his manager were a kind

person—and what person

who catalogs ruin for

a living isn’t at least patient

with imperfection—

he would be kinder than

the part of me that imagines

how this story’s trajectory

involves squad cars and any

of several ways the thief

winds up with a banshee

in his brain, a phrase

that tastes decidedly unlike

the dirt that filled first

the mouth and nostrils

and then each of the thief’s

ears when the police mashed

his head repeatedly into the ground.

They thought doing so was just

the beginning of retribution,

which is a kind of justice common

but ill-suited to human existence.

To the thief, whose brain

would soon start hissing

the word criminal at the image

of itself hanging in the mirror

on the barnacled wall

of its one room, the brutality

was as much inevitable as it was

an opportunity to say good-

bye to the endless and unwearied

stones inside the earth, to feel

in the ground’s looseness

how they had already begun

to forgive him. That the world

will not forgive him should be

obvious. See the way it lets

the word criminal persist inside

him for the span of time

it keeps him away. If you want

to imagine it, imagine

permanent orange internal lightning

bolts because orange is the closest

a name for a color comes to damage.

Then imagine, in time, the thief

let back out in the world;

imagine him entering the thicket

of trees just behind his mother’s

house (where else do you think

he’d live?), imagine him

digging in the dirt there

for a rock to talk to.

Imagine him working by hand

whole feet down without

uncovering a single stone,

just mounds of soil

and the trench his desperation

built. Imagine the volume

of what he does not find.

Imagine his mother standing

at her back door, a mug of tea

pressed against her temple,

having watched her son

slip into the greenery

for the purpose of she knows

not what, and how the bleating

thing that fills her then is her

wonder at how deep into

the trees her son must go

before she can say he’s gone

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin
Find more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

was about the taste of buckshot in baked swan.

I wanted to remember more, but couldn’t.

Someone suggested bloodletting. Someone else

suggested several hours of ghost talk. I suggested

nothing. Picture this. Picture her with a rifle

posed beside a Buick. Picture her taking someone’s

stray blast in the chest while quail hunting in 1942.

Picture how she dressed her wounds and drove

herself over hours of knocking Idaho backroads

to the nearest doctor’s house. There was a war on,

after all. (Though when isn’t there a war on?)

Every act amounted to a sacrifice. Tell me, Mary,

which of my actions counts as preparation for life

during wartime. Yes, the inconsistent stretches

and push-ups. Yes, the quiet watching in the night.

No, the amount of toilet paper I use each week.

No, all my fawning over music. Not even Napalm Death,

Machine Gun Etiquette, or “Life During Wartime.”

No, the writing of poems. When Creeley called Koch

lightweight—or rather when I came across this

while reading someone’s gloss on the poetry wars—

it sounded like Creeley believed his poems

could chop wood, start fires, inflict wounds.

In poetry the goal is always to inflict wounds.

So say the vagaries of some strange muse. I do

terrible things and claim I’m only following orders.

Picture these stanzas leavened with dead elephants.

Picture the mad man setting fire to the tree.

Picture yourself. Picture this misfortune.

To be alive in words other than your own.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

Now when I see a night

that’s weak with clouds,

it makes me nervous.

All those rings

wrenched around the moon.

There are rhymes I don’t remember

that say whatever it is

such a sky’s rising

supposedly portends.

Whatever it is, I feel it.

Sometimes I wish

the night were unnecessary.

Most nights that I feel that way

I feel the same

about day come daybreak.

See the sun bleeding

through the trees? Not being

a sailor doesn’t make you

any safer from it. I used to think

being left-handed meant

I was more likely to die

in a car wreck. Turns out

the biggest risk is living.

There is a grimness

to that thought; something

shallow and permanent.

When I want to be

better than that,

I give myself

one of Whitman’s catalogs

to chew on. It doesn’t last,

that first, capacious bubble of patience.

However well he may have

wandered and adored it,

Whitman knew

the world is a livid vale of dust,

also that it’s insane

with blood, and he never even

wept in West Virginia.

When snow

surprised everyone in late

April in New Jersey, 1890,

did Whitman’s neighbors

roll their eyes

at all of his raw praise?

Even if they weren’t farmers,

they likely knew

what damage spring snows can do.

Did he? One book I’m reading

makes the claim that

“Whitman disliked farming

with some passion.”

In my one year

as a farmhand I laid fire pots

between orchard lines

whenever it would snow.

Everything about those hours—

the limbs’ frigid,

fractal beauty, briefly

outgrowing my discomfort

with the open—

I detested and desire.

Even sipping schnapps

between the rows, how

the darkness gave everything

the gauzy, aquatic depth

of the impersonal

and alluring. Going through,

setting down the tiny burning bowls,

I was as slow about that

as I was everything. My boss

called me Mr. Dreamy

and meant it

as an insult. I haven’t

gotten over it so much

as tried to sculpt my life

such that my being

dreamy isn’t going to cost

anyone’s bottom line.

One harvest day that year

I forgot which way

the road knifed and flipped

the truck

and walked away.

When the ambulance arrived,

I smiled and tried to wave it by.

When my boss arrived

he threw a wrench at me.

It was dark by then.

I’d been sitting there for hours.

The sky was clear.

The moon

blew through it.

The road below

was lit bright

with our tremendous apples.

My whole life

I have wondered

what’s become of me.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

In 1892 a man awoke wishing his name meant

detour on the way to pleasure because the angel

wings he sprouted in the night, though useless,

came with the most arduous requirements

for care. His neck grew long and exhausted

always having to reach his face around to peck

away the chiggers and the grit. He went through

the streets wrapped in so many gray scarves

people mistook him for a cloud. Though he was

more than just a font of gloom. He translated

Medea and The Bacchae into French. The scripts,

while obviously the work of an amateur,

were warmly received. Other things happened,

possibly the most important being that when he died

his bones came to rest upon an English heath.

Henry Moore, age eleven, walking lost in one brown

chill of spring, already convinced he would

never adequately render a single human face,

found the bones, mistaking them for the dead

branches of a tree that had tried in its sprouting

to turn human. It was like watching fire,

Henry in his later years said of this moment.

It was like watching fire, then becoming fire.

Suddenly you could make everything as you do burn.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

This close, I for the fourth decade notice how

beautiful I find the stark black lashes of his eyes.

It’s autumn—after autumn, actually—everything

awash in the given plenty of spent leaves. Ice

in the air despite the sun. A few bars of something

bracing I can’t quite place grace the whole of the cradle

that we’ve made. I slow as if to ask what song is that?

I can’t stop noticing, which is already a kind of asking.

Which is one way to have a story go on without end.

Another way to keep a story from ending

is never to start telling it. My brother’s silent,

split, spilt, bruised, half-buried in his milk, gone

red at the tongue, orange at the eye. So entwined

and still I don’t once stagger in the dirt.

I still have my brother. My hands know this

by the weight. As if the worth of life were knowing.

I never knew I could carry him. Now it’s another story.

Once I caught his front teeth with a bat.

Once I saw a dog chasing a child and I tackled it.

I didn’t think of fear until its body was here,

livid in my arms. By then there was no time. Now,

out of my hands, my hands grate air like they are the place

in the earth where roots continue to turn dirt into themselves

while above a blade has clipped the bloom completely.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Charlie Clark

Whoever did this must be

kin to that matador I saw

booed out of the arena for not

basking longer in the task.

Why else would your snout

be sewn in that hasty, ragged

line and set off center?

Your eyes are two wool holes

with nail heads for pupils.

When I peer into the rust

of them I can’t even see

an oblong version of myself.

Bear, if this is an elegy,

you ought to have a name

more specific than Bear.

Not that you care, but I am

going to call you Lou Reed.

Because whoever made him

quit working with the face

still a bunch of half-done

lumps of clay. Also because

he’s one whose output

illustrates how art is not

getting what you want.

Art is getting only what

he decides to give you.

Lou Reed, you give me

the impression that a career

spent so close to killing

only becomes more intolerable

as it goes on. Even if

one is elegant, thoughtful,

and perfect at it, after

a while one’s limbs are

going to revolt. Lou Reed,

this is what I think. When

the taxidermist hammered

those nails into your eyes

it was the final step

in his coming to hate

anyone who could look

at his life’s work work and not

regret being human.

Once he finished up with you,

he left his studio. He walked

to a lake where a pair of swans

were doing circles. He liked

the elegance of their bodies

on the water. He gave thanks

that the way they mate for

life makes these creatures

no less adamant and cruel

First he fed the swans

the crackers he had brought.

When those were gone

he let them have his hands.

from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library

Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.