Patricia Clark
Patricia Clark is the author of Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, her sixth book of poems, and three chapbooks. She has work just out (or forthcoming) in Plume, The Southern Review, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Pedestal, Quartet, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. Her poem “Astronomy: ‘In Perfect Silence’” was chosen to go to the moon as part of the Lunar Codex on a NASA Space X flight in fall 2024.
Until It Speaks
Maybe my ears are made
mostly for reasons of symmetry,
balance like the way I feel
about rivers. You can't really
get them to speak to you
with a short acquaintance.
If you walk there on a first
or second try, notice
frogs taking leave of the bank
exclaiming something in frog
language, maybe "eek!"
And you check out a blue
rowboat pensive as a
lover moored and forlorn
at a landing. Walked half
a mile, nothing yet
spilled into the ears, wrought
into words. For starters,
you have to be willing to step
into the long grasses, beyond,
to pass the soothsayer's
maison, recently abandoned
upon her death, to go there
again at dawn, then after dark
to the Garonne's banks. What did
you say you were willing
to do? Think a year
or more. Think learning
a new palette of riverine
words. There is one
dictionary for its dialect,
left open at the soothsayer's
desk, a pencil mark
in the margin at the word
raiment. Isn't it how
we dress our indifference?
As though anyone were coming
strolling along to be fooled.