Adam Clay
The Candor of Absence
Allowing the space you fill
to become less like something
vulnerable and more like
something caught in a brief
gleam of light seems enough
of an act to complete
today. At morning each
of us wake in unknowing
until the pieces lift up
from where we left
them the night before. Instead
of an elegy (an arrangement
of a puzzle that will never rise up),
there’s something to be said
for cufflinks, a meal unfinished,
and the shadow of a face
where the face should be. After
all, what’s worse: brevity
or the absence of brevity, a sun
shallow and just beyond the clouds?
Meditation on Missing Out
When the idea arrives
you are mostly elsewhere,
not yet having noticed
the notion of forever
carved out of moments
and not years. What did you say
in the sand covered with silt? A
nd why? The time zones
sometimes find us rather
than us crossing them—
mornings manage nonsense
better than midday
though the eye catches light best
when there’s little light to be
caught, the darkness of night
like a poem within a poem.
--
Adam Clay is the author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012)and The Wash (Free Verse Editions, 2006). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, and online at Poetry Daily and the Academy of American Poets' PoemADay project. He coedits Typo Magazine, serves as a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review, and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.