Four Poems from   
Where They Know
by ALAN CLARK (2010)

Before the Next Scene


It may not matter that the moon was up,
but I was cold and bored and waiting
while the warmer extras sat together
in their game of what, given exile
on an island plunked in nowhere and two
choices only, they would choose to bring…
listened at the edges of their laughter
as the ring of voices circled round the fire
until it stopped with one young woman,
strange to me, who, looking through the darkness
in my shadowy direction (I saw eyes
and not a smile) said: Cigarettes. And him.





A Tarot


I see your Swordplay is a slight of hand
in which you disappear, to come again
the self proclaiming savior of old Knaves
and Knights, the one who gives his Hearts away.

I see you see through no one else’s eyes,
watch you enter rooms, go onto floors where
music spells the steps, and know that you don’t mind
the always starting out again the Fool

whose cliffs you tango near, still holding back
your ace (the Hanged Man up your sleeve) and out,
your Cups in toasts to brinks you have to dare,
still blessed in all the arts of He and She.





My Fantasy on Absence


is one more night with never you,
entering my dream to lie beneath
or ride above me, your face a moon,
your hair all tangled in the ceiling stars.

My fantasy on absence is the aftermath,
the strange geometry of what is you
and never you, soft mission of your body
inside every dreaming cell of me who only
awes himself with never you in smiling
relativity.

                   My speed of light,
you square me with your energies and my
fantasy on absence is the never
ever you so ever close inside me.





And Still No You, Morena


Not that I’m in waiting anymore –
that little house where morning glories
wound around the broken gate, is gone.

They’re all so blurry sharp, those days,
when heat would settle into dust and then
we’d walk out just to hear cicadas
where the trees grew tall, and nothing else,
to smell the smoky residue of fields
that had been burned to make them green.

The cistern dripped our afternoons away,
and soft we spoke and kissed each other’s lips,
and slow we took our time with all the rest
until the evening stars had gathered at
the window where the cat was smiling down.






©2014 Alan Clark