Tom Clark Poems

Nice spring day off big white cloud
At Inspiration Point escaping time wars
Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains
...

The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone
Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body,
Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests,
...

Poetry, Wordsworth
wrote, will have no
easy time of it when
the discriminating
...

Then it was always
for now, later
for later.
And then years of now
...

As in that grey exurban wasteland in Gatsby
When the white sky darkens over the city
Of ashes, far from the once happy valley,
This daze spreads across the blank faces
...

sleepwalker can never die
he is the chemical soldier
composite of latex
and atropine,
hellfire, warthogs,
desolation, pride,
apaches, lasers,
dust

devils swirling,
screaming fire
deaths, machine
worship, young blond
pilots flashing thumbs
up, excited smiles
of interviewed
military wives, shrapnel-

paced rockeye
anti-personnel
bombs spraying
death like fireflies
over a texas barbecue
of human flesh
stretching sixty miles
across open desert,

armageddon
over eden, algebraic
mosaic
of witchcraft, dot
pattern magic of omens
and signs,
victims never
knowing what

hit them, vivid
delivery of hell
to nineveh,
incendiary
reduction of tissue
to shadows on the sand,
incineration of boots
with human feet still

in them, pain,
mania,
technology,
history, delirious
victims bleeding,
eagle with the brains
of a weak and

frightened victim in
its beak, unhappy
fate, grief,
shame, helpless
rage
...

Every day I peruse the box scores for hours
Sometimes I wonder why I do it
Since I am not going to take a test on it
And no one is going to give me money

The pleasure's something like that of codes
Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say
So as brightly to picturize Eurydice
In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day

The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi
...

ephemeral as tinkerbell
unmoored yet not unmoved
tossed cloudward, flipped

sans volition

into the flow

going but not wanting to go
without the other flotsam
...

Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to
Obtain the license, get the picture.
Spook finders must find spooks to put the face,
Name and space coordinates together.
What is kept in the mind perimeter
Retains a wild autonomy through fate.

I will retreat to the precorporate.
Let fate have what is fate's and allow
This spirit to slip through time's difficult
Nets with the devious fingers of
A wild wind, while I run along behind.
...

The god of war assured King Arsounas, "Do not be fooled by words. No life is taken. Know that no one was ever born, nor does anyone die." In the violent mini-eternity of the warrior, combat is conducted according to a ritual formal as song: no one is ever born, no one can ever die. The left-handed rockabilly guitarist whose left arm was severed by an RPG round at Dak To has come back to life in a part of my body that died long before we started to patrol this part of the river of eternal woe. His life is mine though I never lived it. The violent backwash of the rotors is crimsoned by a fine aerosol spray of blood while a loudspeaker amplifies the goddess' excited laughter.
...