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

—Wee Willie Keeler

“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

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

—Tommaso Ceva

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

—Jim Thompson

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

—Satchell Page

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

—Paul Valery

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

—Mae West

“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

“Let’s play two.”

—Ernie Banks

Admitting Belief

We were sun-wrecked and itching to go back
from lunch into the green lakewater, when
the lifeguards screeched their whistles over
and over and we looked up to see them waving

everyone out. Calm, fatalistic, Protestant, you
bear with me when I tell this story every few
years, nod, shake your head, tell me, Go on.
My mother demanded we come to her and so we sat,

watched the pool go lifeless while a big woman
screamed and pointed there and there and again
there at ripples under the high dive until it became
clear her kid was missing. Five decades later I fear

it’s true: Someone’s always missing. This time
I don’t describe for you each scenario I’ve dreamed
and told too often. One may be right there, around
the corner, or may be hiding, counting seconds

in his room, the shades down, the lights off,
the clock and phone cords pulled from their sockets.
Or another may have taken off in the pitch inhalation
of 2AM so no one will sense her empty bed, or

she may be missing in the altogether breathless
way that surges like adrenaline, the cop on duty
not picking up the phone that hasn’t yet rung,
can’t ring because the fathers or wives or roommates

can’t bring themselves to dial, can’t enter the phase
in which to call is to admit belief. Some nights
my trouble is, I can’t escape the incoming silence
of alarms that tell me I should believe in something

other than the pulse knifing my temple. After
my mother huddled us onto the blanket
in the branching shadows, I kept waiting for her
to say it was time to pack, head home, we have to go,

now. But she sat, rapt, peering at the ripples
for minute after howling minute. The year before,
as we ate after-school snacks, she’d hung up the phone
too slowly, her face literally gnarling with grief

and rage when she dragged us into the living room,
then made us kneel at the coffee table, the rosary
vibrating in her bloodless hands. You say, for some,
prayer’s a comfort, a means. Soon enough,

three lifeguards with thick rope hoisted the body─
its awful white─up the wall where they performed
the useless rituals of respiration. Why did she need
to watch? You take my hand, tell me my mother

was a driven woman, so righteous even god
would think twice before talking back to her.
Tonight she too is among the missing.
I can’t shake her last skeletal image when

the screen in the cancer ward flat-lined. Bodies
float to the surface. I squeeze your hand, hold on
to what it is I have. Outside, closing in─the dark,
the wind, the ceaseless, invisible gatherings.

[The Southern Review]
—from The Consecrations, by Kevin Clark

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