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

—Paul Valery

“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

“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

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

—Gertrude Stein

“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

“Let’s play two.”

—Ernie Banks

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

—Mae West

“Poetry begins where certitude ends.”

—Eavan Boland

“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

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

—Robert Frost

Two Stories

—wire service photo, Hungarian border

Once again the migrants eat the road.
In the paper, a young couple, fit and hungry…
I study them like ancestors. They hug, wave
at the camera, having hung from a raft
then slogged the alien miles before
crossing a demarcation unknown
to the earth upon which it’s drawn—
an invisible stripe running on like a joke
that’s been told and re-told since the first
line was drawn in the dirt. The couple
swell up with their own resolve,
survivors of lice-laced coffee grounds,
puddled water, grasses in the center lane.
In the community of marriage
they’ve become the power of myth.

***

At the movies last night I sat next to my wife,
laughed at the sardonic jokes, the wise
American actress, her domestic comedy
asserting its complex of new ethics.
I knew we’d soon walk into the night,
order caramel gelatos, then go home
sloshed in the plush boat of all that cream.
And so, for a few mindless hours, we
entered the same domain the couple
would have entered in their own country
had the joke of history not demanded
a new version of the same moral—
Once inside, our very touch is the wall
beyond which we may choose not to see.

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

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