Kevin Clark
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Rose
—Zurburan’s Still Life at the Norton Simon Museum

 

Isn’t the painting seduced into memory
by its unreal arrangement? Even here
I have to use a word suggesting
sex. All my friends laugh, claim
I’m obsessed with sex. —Not quite.
I’m obsessed with the question inside
sex. The anticipant pause before
union. And let’s face it, making love
can seem chimerical, especially when it’s

just over. Why did my parents
arrange such a mysterious painting
on my bedroom wall? Did they really
think I’d see the painter’s version
of the holy trinity? The lemons,
the oranges, the slim teacup garnished
with a rose? When I was eight
the print’s light excited the air
(there I go again), and I swam amid
the colors. They called good-night,
then the lights went out. For years
I imagined eating the big oranges
so often that I woke with rind
on my lips. It tasted like your name,
whoever you are. Last week
at the museum I entered the citrus
and floral light of the famed room.
You were there, tall, crooked neck,
half your hair dyed amber. You may have
been speaking in code. In a dream
I started having a decade ago, I’d
walk up behind you to smell your hair
as if it were an ur-language whispered
before there were churches. How
I closed my eyes amid its call. And
then, your smile, your vanishing. So,
​
that’s what it’s always about. Always
the unearthly lemons much larger
than the oranges, the oranges
swelling beyond their basket, the saucer
too too wide for its cup. And the rose,
a day past youth, what to make
of its momentary balance? —How
it’s paused inexplicably sideways
on the tip of that single white petal,
these centuries of abeyance,
such stalling, as if to forever delay
the pleasure of the fall...

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Kevin Clark’s third volume of poems The Consecrations is published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. A limited hardbound run is available in celebration of the one-year anniversary of its publication. His second book Self-Portrait with Expletives won the Pleiades Press prize. Clark’s poetry appears in the Southern, Antioch, Georgia, and Iowa reviews, as well as Crazyhorse, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Poetry Northwest, etc.
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