Patricia Clark
Patricia Clark is Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. Author of four volumes of poetry, Patricia’s latest book is Sunday Rising. 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, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Coal Hill Review, Plume, and elsewhere. Her new manuscript of poems is called Goodbye to the Poetry of Marble.
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.