TUESDAY POEM | Pond by T. Clear

Cup of Water, Cup of Sky  |  CB 2014

                     POND

                          We roamed beyond subdivisions

                          to this rain-brimming vacancy in some

                          city planner’s scheme. Not lovely,

                          but a version of heaven wet enough

                          to lure amorous toads whose eggs

                          we scooped into Folger’s cans.

                          Sloshed home, the rank goo

                          dripping a slithery trail.

                          We set them hatching in a fishbowl,

                          floated bits of boiled romaine.

                                     This is a common story:

                                     a patch of forest slashed in an afternoon,

                                     a clearcut of nettles, salal, bracken.

                                     Tiger lilies in their forgotten glade wrenched, ripped.

                                     Lots flagged, foundations poured.

                          And then into the worm barrel

                          out back, growing less finny each day.

                          Finally springing high enough

                          they leapt beyond borders

                          into what remained of murmuring woods,

                          the decrescendo of frogsong

                          becoming the planet’s

                          inexorable hum.

                          T. Clear

Pond was first published in Cascadia Review in their June 2013 issue, the first of five of T. Clear's poems to appear in the journal over the course of a week - each one finely, tautly-wrought; each one differently atmospheric, graceful and gritty. These are poems in which noise is hushed and the earth's subtler music is allowed to come through.

  

In Holy Week, T writes

                      All was new or new to me

this one line a distillation or container for her ever-alert poet's eye, ear and heart. She writes into and out of our always-in-motion, oft chaotic, ever-renewing world.  

Friend and fellow poet, Melissa Green, posted a comment on the Cascadia site that reiterates these qualities of T's sensibility and voice  - "How wonderful to have a week’s worth of your poems available all at once. Congratulations! So many of your themes are familiar–apple picking, fishing with your father (so moving! the gifts of that day!), a Catholic Easter– but the details of your language color them as yours and no one else’s, and beautifully poignant."  

In her Statement of Place on the Cascadia site, T writes, "I was born in Seattle and have lived joyfully in the Pacific Northwest for fifty-six years. In my travels to other landscapes across the planet, there is always the ache to return to this topography of foothills and craggy peaks, of saltwater and freshwater always in easy reach." 

Please visit the Cascadia Review website to enjoy more of T's poems and click on the quill below for this week's Tuesday Poems

Michelle Elvy is this week's Tuesday Poem editor - and hub-sub editor for the coming three months. She has chosen this year's Takahe prize winning poem Uncoupling by Jac Jenkins -

                                 "Ice clasps its thorny cloak with filigreed

                                  brittle lace against my breast

                                  bone. The pin sticks my skin when I inhale. . . "