Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. However, this week’s poet, John Clark, lives on the East Coast.
Clark is a retired English teacher living in Warren, N.J. He spent most of my career teaching a Language Arts course in which the last quarter of every year was devoted to poetry for 8th graders. He said he’s privileged to have met several members of the pantheon of Modern American Poets through decades of activities offered by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey. Clark has written for years and said he will continue to write for pleasure and edification. It reminds him both of who he is at his core and of the connection among people and ideas that exist outside the constraints of ordinary language. Here's his poem "Nova."
Wheeled out of the rehab center,
Sophie can still smile,
after eighty-eight years
and a pack-rat’s
cellar of trouble
cleaned out by her daughters.
Her smile furls,
catches
some wind of ancient thought,
as she attempts a course across
the sudden tear
in her universe
that brought her to this place
and also broke her right arm.
Her white cloud of hair billows as
wheelchair wheels move her,
as she crosses
the threshold of relief
and a kind of bliss —
brought by the prospect of
escape from this place
into the close orbit of family…
brought by the certainty
her husband is alive
again…
and by the carnival conviction
that her parents are,
as well.
Sophie’s ideas move up
and down her timeline,
on the see-saw she rides now –
she knows a son-in-law
but not which daughter
he has married;
her brother is dead,
but later he will slip into
a dinner table space,
surprising that guest.
She will not recall
grandchildren
because they are in California now
looking even further west
toward the unexplored frontier
of their own children.
Her Schrodinger’s cat mind is there
and not there simultaneously –
and the act of speaking to her
collapses it into one state,
then the other.
An Easter meal she is traveling to
celebrates resurrection
from the dead place
she was aiming toward
even before her fall,
before her everythings
jumbled
and her younger sister returned,
along with the nuns
from grammar school.
Now, the thirtieth daily visit of the
same person is forever
new,
like some sudden star appearing
repeatedly
in a stutter of explosion
before the startled astronomers of
her deepening night sky.
John Clark
