CM Clark

Cantata

They remember my child’s voice singing, charming
Though incapable of hitting the highest notes
And flawed in elocution,
But more than provocative in gesticulating grace
And pliant phrasing.
Their memories encoded in radio waves
And in each recorded re-make
That reawakens the enormous oddity
Of failed love flung forth from the lips
That serenaded betrayal,
While still stained with chocolate milk
And schoolyard snacks.
Hymns of love lost and found
And anachronistic show-tunes
Duets with mute dolls
And reel-to-reel renditions
Back-to-back with the dead voice
Of a long gone grandmother.

Now I prefer my love songs to be silent
To sing their lilts to the page
And seduce your inner ear
When I am not there
When I am miles away burning dinner
Distracted, burning my arm with a preheated oven
Burning skin with sinuous rhythms
Electromagnetically commanding
The hairs on your arms to rise
On command, when you are alone
After midnight
With the candle’s wax melting helplessly
Melting your will
When my oratories
Lift off the page
Hitting notes
Not part of any known scale.

The Season of Smoke and Tigers

I.
The brush is burning,
And every dreamed dawn without rain
Draws brazen flame five miles closer to the settlements.
Five more restless sleepers toss with night sweats
And rise to daylight with burning eyes
And the fevers of incendiary melaleucas.
My hours are licked with fire,
Charring the squared corners to rippling cinder,
Swallowing the margins,
The breathing space of penciled words,
In combustible outpouring afterburn.
Guerrilla tactics in a lost war, vague
And unwinnable.
The known world is all smoke and operatic ash,
Arias of swan-sung finale.
The signs are everywhere.
The theater evacuates, prematurely.
The curtain calls, pointless
Without witness.

Predictably, the sky will darken with downsliding afternoon.
Portents of storm...or merely more smoke clouds prismatic
Replicating endless Nagasaki in meltdown.
But thunder swells in the distance now,
And thin sunlight skitters away toward shelter.
The endless tease of rain, both blessing and curse.
Which is worse? To drown
And draw some last lungless breath,
Or incinerate and fly,
Papering the air with carbon filaments,
Bits of bone.
A preternatural stillness, fires quelled,
Still sulking, cowed,
Smoke still wandering the western edges.
A moment’s respite, yet unsettled,
Still anticipating the long-awaited conflagration,
My own asphyxiating Armegeddon,
The ambiguous bonfire of the vanities.

II.
The tiger crouches in the summer heat, lurking in the city,
Escaped with the baritone thunder
From domestic cloud confinement
To hunt wilder game on wilder grounds.
I test the territory, foraging by scent,
Ear pressed to earth, overturning
Suspicious clods of flat grass,
Traces of tread,
Listening for the muffled hum of disturbed air,
The dreaded echoes of purr and cat pant.

Camouflaged with overgrowth, the tiger’s fur subdues,
Licked along the grain.
I am out of range,
But his savage linearity points north, like witching wands
Divining my wintry cave among the ice floes.
His heat is tremendous, galactic,
Radiating shivers along my longitudes
And thermal pulse in the scars of old wounds.
Magnetized beyond reason, I float...
Masses of metallic filings
Orbiting, imprisoned in freeplay pull
Around his feral singular sun.
Torrid feline reticence that makes me
Lust for rain.

III.
A surprising hint of wet earth in the wind
Prefaces water.
Sleeping soil dreaming exhales
Open-mouthed to drink,
To end the drought,
Beg lilies to bloom
Before the storm harvests their delicate scent
And sails their veined petals finger-like
Onto blind-driving channels in full flood.

I build my ark to set sail at world’s end.
Sweet arcs at the sheerline,
Sweet curl at the lifting strakes, the keel.
Sweetest curvilinear cruelty of sweet mouth.
Lost on land, I launch
And steer to sea.
Pure words laid aboard in predicate pairs
Like provisions to mediate my slipshod survival
After the deluge.
Subject and verb bedded in sweet complicity,
Co-conspirators of syntactic symmetry.
“I am”
“You are”
At last, “we cannot.”

I may never rest
Assured,
Never know beyond chemical
Alchemical surety
If all that rain would kill or cure.
If your honeyed whisper like waters unchained
Was water
Or water with flames.

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© 2005 by CM Clark