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