CM Clark

Balancing Act
A balancing act
Of death-defying bravado.
A small boy rushing his morning route
Along a tightrope of time Towards school and his day.
It was our son who pedaled so furiously,
Books hunkered firmly to his back,
Bike helmet bouncing over each rough patch
Of suburban sidewalk,
And a violin
Balanced reverently on the handlebars.
It was clear
That the schoolbooks and homework were safe,
Borne aloft by the ten-year-old bones
And evolving musculature.
The helmet was dispensable.
But the violin enjoyed the pride of place,
Privileged to ride between his careful small hands,
Never leaving his sight Or the control that steered him.
Such an elegant equipoise he struck
On a Wednesday morning In the fall of his tenth year.
He was our child.
And what future grace
And designs of sweet Mozart his moment made.
Harbingers of a melodic future,
Sacrificing nothing of real significance.

Rehearsal for Losing You:
An Elegy

In the clear quiet of late spring
Comes the evening lull
As hawks search for night roosts
And the north-climbing sun burns late
Through my neighbor's poinciana.
A bevy of small younglings trill the air
In two-step chase of each other's shirt-tails.
And the slow-fading light
So present on the still street.
Nothing to disturb the suspended serenade of their play
Except nightfall.
The sweet sopranos of this time
Are called in
And gone and lost are the hilarity and song and soon
They along with their milk teeth
Will fall and fade from view.
So they go too soon,
Far from my delirious embrace.
A sadness unspeakable
In losing childhood for the second time.
Down the street the shadows lengthen.
The road curves north with them
Out of our garden world,
As in their hunger they rush
Towards the asphalt and silicone fleshing their time.
Along the turnpikes and interstates they creep,
The heartless distance making mockery of mere road miles.
So they shoulder for position with the uprising generation
To await change at the toll plaza
And drive all night,
Where out into the thundering dark

They throw their dolls, their sagas of hurt feelings,
And their souvenirs, never looking back.
What was once our center,
Sweet now in memory only,
Constricts, a shallow breathless knot of longing.

America of the heartland and the cities of the plain
Await their flowing chic, their hard-earned spurs.
With a few short spent birthay candles behind them,
Their young bodies prepare to fear war
Make peace make love
Eat light drink deep
And grow to their maturity,
I can neither stop them
Nor help them.
And my mother love, wild shield and inchoate prayer,
Dissipates with the morning.
Loss with no end.

Loss accumulates and accrues interest.
Spatial boundaries tighten.
So each home my parents live in
Grows successively smaller,
Crowded painfully and claustrophobic,
More idiosyncratic in design
More formulaic in the blurring edges,
More alien in shape, smell and taste.
And still,
Mother love wells up to greet me
When I enter their world.
Like dust, up from the once fashionable living room sofa,
Up from the carpet uncleanably stained,
In like a flood from the bedroom closet,
Where the hidden trophies and mementos of lifetime
Wait for me to claim one day.
At what point did the journey home
Become a visit?
Home and not home
With them in their cramped kitchen, the chipped dishes,
At their table, a scarred surface now
Overtaken with bills to pay
And crafts in progress from the senior center.
Home, but not my home.
Yet home is where they eat.
Where they sleep in innocence like newborns
And dream of sparkling years
Fading daily down the twilight corridors,
And dream of the still untold future unacknowledged
That circles their humble campsite.
With patience their future hovers,
Dark wings casting shadows on their bright late afternoons.
Napping on the terrace while the laundry dries.
In deference to my desires,
My mother inquires whether
I'd prefer their interment
Here in this land of sunsets,
Or back home where their people
Our people
Rest.
Because I'll want to visit,
She imagines,
And visits are often factored
By miles.
She sang to me in my cradle.
The melodies still croon to my heartbeat.
Lullabies in another language,
The mother tongue,
Her mother's language
Of ghettos and peasant duels to the death
And the sweet sleep of childhood's day,
And the promise, singular and holy,
That mama won't go away.

Along these same singing wires
I sense you slipping away
When I am closest to you.
Just the length of two hands squared,
Yet you seem most remote
And elusive. So abstracted
Your ardent heart now,
Which intoned such sweetness immeasurable,
But only when safely encased in four walls
And separated by light
Years. A sobering dance
Of eventual disconnection
And electronic short-circuitry.
Now toneless,
The bare residue only of music recollected.
The thread that binds us I find is a delicate silk.
Elastic in surprising ways,
But regrettably unresilient,
Turbulent but untempered.
Staring down the miraculous
Looms the harsh code of daily commerce,
Paternal and unforgiving
And every miscue a botched tramp on rotting boards,
The sound of one hand clapping.
Words can give no voice to this heartache,
And lamenting comes only in keens and whispers.
Grief is the other side of longing.
To mourn what is lost is the noontide elegy.
My midnight sorrow belongs to what is dreamed
But never found.
Or found so briefly
And desired so ravenously,
Or so imperfectly to be no more than barren grammars
Emptied of significance.
What was once a stunning fiction of heaven
Is now paradise lost
Again.
And when all is said and done and gone
My consolation must be
To nurse this thief's horde of language,
Re-enacting at my will the ancient mystery
Of words becoming flesh once again.
And there you will be
As in glistening springtime,
Young and breathing the ripe air,
Your eyes like textured mahogany in the slanting light,
Missing nothing.
A golden mirror
Reflecting back
The last line of our common odyssey.
A vision of my own apotheosis.
And someday the ink will dry out
And the page sink back to oaken fiber and ash.
The sun will burn down, the earth expire.
All babies stillborn,
All mothers in childbed dead.
And someday I will lose everything I love,
Each new grief another link
In the double helix of the predictable.
Just one more rehearsal
For finally losing you.

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© 2005 by CM Clark