Charlie Clark
Poetry
Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow and recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he is the author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, Texas.
Devil Watching as, in the Midst of Your Isolation, Your Child Insists on Opening All of Her Umbrellas
Or is it in the mist, in the scarfing umber light where nothing shows
any symptoms. Admit it, the main thing your life lacks
is mist. It’s a common problem, like living
so long you’ve forgotten what to bow before. In this house you go on
eating the dandelion butter you have churned uncertainly,
your uncertainty extending slowly as the antennae of the garden
slug you took these ingredients from. Your child wakes doing math
gleefully because she fears the further loneliness of sleep;
your child, who for days will speak only in the timbrous
barking of a wolf, whose favorite instruments for six years were the clanger and the gong,
who has stopped asking for music and peonies,
who wants only a silence into which, occasionally, you are to describe
the faces of her friends just so she can tell you you have done something inexplicable
and repeatedly wrong.
any symptoms. Admit it, the main thing your life lacks
is mist. It’s a common problem, like living
so long you’ve forgotten what to bow before. In this house you go on
eating the dandelion butter you have churned uncertainly,
your uncertainty extending slowly as the antennae of the garden
slug you took these ingredients from. Your child wakes doing math
gleefully because she fears the further loneliness of sleep;
your child, who for days will speak only in the timbrous
barking of a wolf, whose favorite instruments for six years were the clanger and the gong,
who has stopped asking for music and peonies,
who wants only a silence into which, occasionally, you are to describe
the faces of her friends just so she can tell you you have done something inexplicable
and repeatedly wrong.