3 poems by Patricia Clark
Male/Female
He would cut into the belly
of one, at the kitchen
sink, Mother squabbling
in the background, and he’d be
up to his elbows in silver,
blood shining from the knife,
the room smelling of sweat,
boots, coffee, smoke, and though
I’d been at home
in bed the whole time, I could
see the Puyallup River, the herons
rising, cattails and redwing
blackbirds with their bottlebrush
shapes and streaks of color,
from shore to shore a thick fog,
but rolling up and off like smoke, a reel
singing as the steelhead ran
with the line, the hurry, the thrash
and splashing, feet stumbling
along the shore to keep up,
to keep the line from getting cut.
Surely this was a victory for them,
Father saying it’s a female, then
he’s pulled out the whole orange clump
to show my brothers.
Yes, he is saying, we’ll use the roe
as our next bait, and How about
Saturday, early? He holds them up
in front of the window, though I was never
actually there to see it, scales smeared
on the faucet, on the hump between
the two sinks, his forearms
all silver and orange on fire. The guts
and severed head lay in a mass on
papertowels. Light glinted thick
through the raised orange
globes. Yes, good thing this was a female.
**
The Green Purse
(for Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941)
“We are drift and flotsam. . .” Stanley Plumly
It isn’t the purse,
green or not, nor the way her husband
gave it wrapped up in a little parcel,
nor the way she says he crept
into her bed that morning—and I think
of her hair unraveled down her neck,
the cotton nightdress mussed from sleep,
probably a tortoiseshell cat named Jig
curled on the comforter—.
However I imagine the scene,
it starts with her and stays January 25th,
1915: “My birthday—& let me count up
all the things I had.”
It isn’t what she says, the “fine
frosty day, everything brisk and cheerful,”
nor the nonstop train, exactly caught,
the reading while she rode, the Picture Palace—
It’s the heart
within each ticking body, mortality clock,
bundle of desire set into say.
All children, we go walking into light,
wanting to step out onto the fresh-cut lawn,
yes, our shoes staining green, and to pick
the poppies or sunny daffodils
without a word raised against us.
Days given as though
they were light, and they are, photon and ray
and particle. What is left
in our hands?
“I was also given a packet of sweet
to bring home.”
**
La Chanson du Rossignol
after the painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau
At first glance, a standard scene—
a girl sitting on a stone block
near the woods while a nightingale sings.
But there’s something heartbreaking
caught in her face, something that speaks
of the tragedies of class, of chores
repeated until the body becomes
as worn and beaten up as a shoe.
Her face, transfixed, shines
with a solemn attention that’s also
weary. What do the bird’s sweet notes
have to do with her? Yes,
she’ll link arms with her love
at dusk and stroll here listening
to the trilling bird, but there’s no denying
economics. Her interlaced hands
are red from work and her feet,
though neatly crossed, are bare,
calloused on the soles, no doubt,
and cracked. The whiteness of her arms,
the intelligent, thoughtful face
will have to be sacrificed. Before long,
she’ll be pregnant, and then
again. Isn’t that part of the thought
in the face, the dark knowledge
of what lies ahead? She would seize
a chance if one were offered,
and she’d make as much of it
as possible—so say the brown eyes,
the spot of red above one cheek.
In reality, though, the painter’s named
and she’s not. Finding her grave—
.
for she’s long since dead—would be
impossible. Her sole moment of fame
remains this pose, the brushstrokes
by his hand in somber hues.
**
Patricia Clark is a poet with four books, most recently Sunday Rising (2013). Wreath for the Red Admiral, a chapbook of poems, is due out in August 2016. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, also appearing in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand. Recent work appears (or is forthcoming) in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Superstition Review, and Plume. A professor in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University, Patricia was poet laureate of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007.
These poems have appeared in print previously: “Male/Female” in Slate magazine. Additionally, that poem appeared in my book My Father on a Bicycle (pub in 2005 by Michigan State Univ Press). Also in that book was “La Chanson du Rossingol.” Lastly, “The Green Purse,” my homage to Virginia Woolf, appeared in my first book of poems, North of Wondering.
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