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. ­­