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.
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."
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. . . "
