For Lola


Waking up to your glimmering Hello,
armor fallen away, doors opening
onto another fine day, slow moving,
“sunny ‘til Thursday”, the breezy whistling
of a veery: unzipping your old green dress…
rehearing our cries out open windows 
into the moon’s lucid paintjob of silver light,
barely touching mist, water, black evergreens,
life swimming close to the bottom at high tide,
and the smell of pine when a night is thick
and startling as bats and only casually pinned 
in place by a few of the very nearest stars.





Come into a Heart


Come into a heart
And listen and look:
A clock with rubies
On a long chain,
An old dog howling,
Dead Mum in a dream
Trying to see the stars
On the church ceiling,
Boxes of painted views…
A child in an orchard
Dissolving into the air
He’s breathing.  Then a hiss
As the sun takes him into itself,
And the grass and the trees 
and the sky, once
And for all time.





Lazing at the Edge of a Volcano


Lazing at the edge of a volcano,
My mind becomes the friend I thought I lost,
Becomes an evening veery saying No,
I have no silver sounds except for you.
And at the ending of a summer day
Creation rests from labor on itself,
Sends veeries from its throat and starts to feel
The microscopic universe expand
In ease, though rocks are burning liquidly
Close beneath a tide that’s coming in and
Bringing what another bird will dive feet first
To catch and tear apart and not call glory,
But not unbeautiful, my mind to bless.


            -three poems above first published in Where They Know by Alan Clark