CM Clark

There Are No Victims

My family’s matrilineal limb lifts
The collective hurt of centuries
Squarely before my eyes,
Eyes inherited from living struggle, hurried coupling,
Dusty rests
To the third generation,
Now charged with overseeing the upsurge,
The degeneration,
The clinching combative breath.

Death colors the days in perilous folly,
Arrogant scarlets in arch mockery belittle
Brittle branches sapped of juices sweet
And sky-climbing,
Now suddenly sere and craving
The cool sullen clay beyond the sun’s reach.

Across earth and ocean’s breach,
Distinctive traits,
Patterns of speech, shy smiles uneasy
Nourish family plots indifferently tended,
Weed-choked at the headstone.
And we are their eyes above ground
Born to notarize both the endless apostrophes
Of unchecked anguish
And the timid consolations
Passing by
Passing on.
I prefer the pain you provide
Unwittingly.

Unwilling witness to secret places bared,
Privacies debased,
I am compelled to look lingering
On flesh not my flesh,
Bone not my bone,
Unblanketed, ungowned, unsightly sights
Dis-easing my stomach, convulsing equilibrium.
Patches of flesh listlessly clinging
To embattled bones,
Embittered ambivalence.
Caught between the tirade of holding on --
The diaspora of letting go.
And in all this stunning slide,
I prefer the pain you provide.

I am named for my grandmother’s mother.
Girl-names, recycled, passed like chainlink
Along the double helix, double-x convergence,
Branding irises blue with insights sightless,
Sore recollections multiplied.
I prefer the pain you provide.

I prefer the name you know me by,
Unfettered with remembered inflections
And ocean voyages, vomiting for weeks
Bound in steerage,
Only to sink to soils unfamiliar,
Nailed in plain pine, at last.

I prefer your eyes, uncluttered
With shadowed knowing,
Unbiased, although unloving.
I prefer the cruelty of love disdained, denied.
I prefer the numinous distance –
Unending, unrelenting –
To their familial chokehold,
Those savage bonds that hold me tied.
I prefer the pain you provide.

Resurrection Day

The dark bird devil-winged and dangerous
Swats at my feathers triggering pulses
Of alarm scorching the dreamer’s cries,
Roused so rudely from the halcyon waters
Of Aphales in the lee of Ithaca.
There is no dissent from this reality
Of geriatric beds and heart monitors
Bleeding their insistent waves of warning
In furious green cipher.
They congregate in emergency rooms at midnight.
The stench of sweat and worry blends savagely
With the dispassionate insistence
Of disinfectant and alcohol swabs.
My father lies helpless, not himself,
Muttering the soundless refrain of we the living,
“I don’t want to die,” as they
Treat him, the worn conglomerate of flesh
That he is, systems failing, flagging nurses
In hectic greens and blues
To check the vitals, adjust the plastic tubing
That siphons clean blood in, poisons out.

I remember a strong man.
Someone who could lift me aloft without effort,
With joy and starlight in his amazed eyes.
A tall man with bristling wild hair, untamed, untameable,
And a million needling pinpoints in that cheek
Always offered down to ground level
Toward my laughing mouth,
Holding him home.

Home after that appendix outburst
Sent a stranger sitting in a folding chair, speechless
In our front yard.
I orbited him reluctantly.
A hesitant planet pulling
Unthreading the strands of genetic gravity
That bound me.
But that stranger morphed in the morning,
Left my world with the sunrise haze,
Left my father rising,
Rising from that invalid’s convalescent silence,
Breaking again with the light
Into co-terminous death-defying day.

And so it has been.
But the selfsame passionate prophet
Who taught me to fear dying
Also led me to fear life
While loving it,
Listing after each dawn-begotten passing day
Nostalgic, with equal measures
Of appetite and dread.
A taste for succulent honeycombed joy
And a horror of futile flesh in mixed metaphor meltdown,
Inscrutably coffin-bound.

And after years of childing, parenting
And living in voyeuristic fascination
Of the second childhood rising,
It has been you who’s fired the cold clay
Sired me alive
Shaped the budding vase
Licked the penpoint with your luscious language,
Showed me how to swallow down the bile
Metabolize the grief,
The life-denying defeat
Encoded in that last sleep sleepless whisper
“I don’t want to live.”

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© 2004 by CM Clark