Kevin Clark Poetry
  • Home
  • About
    • Biography
    • CV Highlights
    • The Other Life
    • Interviews
      • Stephen F. Austin University Press Interview
      • Five Oaks Press
      • Flashpoint
      • Propeller Magazine
      • New Times
      • Pleiades Press
      • Moebius
      • Beacon Street Review
      • Brockport Writers Forum
  • Books
    • The Consecrations
      • Two Stories
      • Admitting Belief
      • In Between
      • Introductory Video
    • The Wanting
    • Self-Portrait with Expletives
      • Flashback at Castelfranco
      • This, Then
      • Eight Hours in the Nixon Era
    • In the Evening of No Warning
      • Our Children Playing Catch in the Evening of No Warning
      • Widow Under a New Moon
      • The Price
    • The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry
      • Sample Quarter Syllabus
      • Sample Semester Syllabus
  • Plays
  • Teaching
    • Philosophy of Teaching
    • Courses & Topics
    • MFA Programs
  • Multimedia
  • Links
  • Contact

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

—David Hare

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

—Mae West

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

—Jim Thompson

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

—Tommaso Ceva

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

—Wee Willie Keeler

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

—Satchell Page

“Let’s play two.”

—Ernie Banks

“Poetry begins where certitude ends.”

—Eavan Boland

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

—Robert Frost

“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

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

—Gertrude Stein

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

—Mark Twain

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

—Paul Valery

Flashback at Castelfranco

Dawn in Micanopy, Florida, and the old Impala
Floats the canopy roads, the last hours of acid
Stripping the protective film from the world
So every tree and fence blazes
With end-of-bandwidth jitters, my breath
A shallow tinnitus audible in the orbit
Of my limbs… I cut the radio and slow
To an idle beneath the live oaks, Spanish moss
Dripping to the roadside floor, my only god
The present moment. Then I turn off
The car lights to drift in new moon silence.
For a few seconds, a great maw encloses.
In beauty and terror, I flash the lights back on
To stay true to the road beneath the canopy,
And a white fence glows in a burst
Until I kill the beams again,
One fascination
And another,
The world’s first question strobing on and off.

Thirty years later, on this moonless scotch broom hill
Above three sleeping late-Renaissance steeples,
All the little windows flicker on below
Like fireflies in the olive trees.
As the dark mountain hulks beneath the last bright shine
Of sky across the valley, the molecules
Of another air
Seem to flood this one. My ten-year-old
Stands with her binoculars and stares
Into the same alluring Tuscan spill, a silent vista
So redolent one can see how prayer erupts.
Aglow, entranced by sunset, she asks how far
To the mountains, there on the other side.
And as I answer in the explanatory lingua she loves,
A host of paternal lies rise, then resign
in my chest. For I know what she’ll come to know
Some long, road-coarse night:
We live in two places at once.
There is darkness and there is the lit-up world,
And behind both
An immeasurable quiet.

[Kestrel]
—from Self-Portrait with Expletives, by Kevin Clark

Share with friends:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Site Overview

  • Welcome
  • About
    • Biography
    • CV Highlights
    • The Other Life
    • Interviews
      • SFAUP
      • Five Oaks Press
      • Flashpoint
      • Propeller
      • New Times
      • Pleiades
      • Moebius
      • Beacon
      • Brockport
  • Books
    • Consecrations
    • The Wanting
    • Self-Portrait
    • In the Evening
    • The Mind’s Eye
  • Plays
  • Teaching
    • Philosophy
    • Courses
    • MFA Programs
  • Multimedia
  • Links
  • Contact
Kevin Clark
Copyright © 2023 All Rights Reserved
Website by Michaels & Michaels Creative, LLC