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.