Kevin Clark Poetry
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“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I already knew.”

—Robert Frost

“A work of art is never completed, merely abandoned.”

—Paul Valery

“In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased.”

—Gertrude Stein

“There is only one plot: Things are not what they seem.”

—Jim Thompson

“Poetry begins where certitude ends.”

—Eavan Boland

“Let’s play two.”

—Ernie Banks

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

—Mark Twain

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

—David Hare

“Keep your eye clear and hit ’em where they ain’t.”

—Wee Willie Keeler

“The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of consciousness at the instant of breasting the tape.”

—Paul O’Neil

“Poetry is a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.”

—Tommaso Ceva

“I like restraint—if doesn’t go too far.”

—Mae West

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

—Satchell Page

Our Children Playing Catch in the Evening of No Warning

A nearness in the twilight, the lovely arc.
Cut grass not yet the scent of elegy.
Then the elegy. Then the years . . .
Now my four year old plying a small ball
across the floor at his nine months sister,
how she first learns to palm it back to him,
my wife listening behind her book, the dusk
rolling over the houses. As my daughter
leans for the next return I unfurl
the fingers of my right hand
to catch a ball my father tosses
a year before his death.
That old fact so dim today.

Such a thing to learn . . .
Not deliverance, nor elegy, always the white ball
in its sure circuit, the easy backward draw
of the glovehand. In the sky above my children

I am playing ball, the warm crutches
leaning like a song in the dugout
as I limp for the batter’s box.
In the sky above my children, I limp
for the batter’s box and watch a soft line drive
float safely above a glove.

And so the forgetting floats
on the small charities of applause,
the pinchrunner’s comic awe . . .
My daughter, my son elaborate in his coaching . . .

We can’t hold all the facts for long.
I’m still surprised how we stopped playing that one night
when my father went inside astonished, hurt
—the ball I’d thrown—
the crisp delayed ache when it drilled his forearm,
his whispering how it actually hit him,
that this was not meant-to-be.

There are no signs. That’s the problem.
As we stop to listen to the last few seconds of dusk
submerge beneath the evening of no warning,
it may strike us again, the breath
actually stricken from our lungs.

Then the nearness in the twilight.
Then the little ones in their time.

[The Journal]
—from In the Evening of No Warning, by Kevin Clark

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