ED RECALLS BEING CARRIED BY CHRIS’S BONES
and flesh
when still
he had
flesh
enough
to carry
things
and pose
chest
to back
shoulder
holding
knee in
a slow
spin Christ
such
a show
it made
makes
sense to
feel as
much in
his body
as floating
up above
it it’s
the way
some
pleasures
have you
or leave
you how
all his
sense in
this now
is floating
how all
that Chris
is in this
now
is bone
is begone
even in
the floating
amid it
beaming in
the body’s
memorial
sense of
carrying
of being
carried
of lightness
of lighting
of being
being light
I WATCHED A SPIDER CLIMB ITS SILK INTO MY MOTHER
into the sea
shell of her
ear there it
spoke to her
with the fine
long patience
I presume usual
among those
accustomed to
a life spent
either regarded
with horror or
unheard opinions
nocturnes on
a piano played
so softly but off
you think it
the composer’s
decomposing
ghost at it
the beleaguered
severed-fingered
one whose process
addiction even
in life’s after-
glow keeps him
from accepting
an imperfect
rendition curling
into the heaven
of its own
vapor and there
drifting that spider
smaller than
pearl jewelry
more delicate
riven I shivered
at the many
conceivable
contagions
offspring etc.
it might convey
to her regardless
she listened
until it
concluded
she nodded
smiled with
two pinched
fingers plucked
it said splendid
like splendor
too were
a common
part of this
avowed not
another word
of their exchange
held her hand
away I watched
as with its eight
enviable legs
to tell it where
it stood like
a strange pale
ember from her
hand up
the rampart of
a curtain it rose
its discretions
returning wherever
they might
wish to in
the unseen green
envelopments
of its folds
“SAINT MATTHEW AND THE ANGEL”(1602)
To my daughter
I do find it
increasingly difficult
knowing how to explain
despite the murder
I still admire the works
of Caravaggio
because he was so unswerving
he said just give me blood
and a feather or something
as adamant as that
that I didn’t make up
probably something even better
every grape every jewel
every length of face or blade
he drew suggests to me
strategies you can
contemplate until you come to
their dirt conclusion
or the museum closes
in that one painting
the one destroyed by fire
in 1945 in a bunker in Berlin
that lives now only in photographs
and fastidiously imagined
studies most easily seen
online even the shin
shining like sunlight on a sword
becomes a place about which
all the livid torpor of his
imperfectly recreated inky umbers
declaims yes even this is
a thing from which flames
like worms eventually will emerge
in abundance
in the painting the bald
man is granted the pen
and such inspiration
his legs are crossed hard
to the point of comic squeezing
one suspects he may not
merely need to
pee but for the first time
be receiving the electric blue
nuances of his serene
accompanying angel
it strokes his hand
its touches
commensurate
one may suppose
with its purported
hollow bones
are as tender as they are
unseen like spring’s
first spider webs sprung
and walked through blindly
leaving across the skin
their slight cursive vines
though what does he hear
the scribe not words
exactly not quite
those he is writing
but something maybe
not words at all
maybe just the shuffling
of wings because
they move tactfully mildly
as lungs he knows
they are not birds’
about the fingers he cannot
see he furrows his face
as though driven
giddy to say
oh how they must gleam
like candles like torches held
aloft a brightness
coming for me
like those delivering
back to its stricken family
a child’s body fallen lost
by some miracle
found alive tonight
unharmed in the deepest
vein of the valley’s wet ravine
yes he thinks
of all of it give me fire
I will greet it
yes please
guide that very light to me
WHEN I BANGED MY HEAD ON THE CEILING
trying
to smash
that
mosquito
that I
had yet to
see but that
you had
said had
after feeding on
you flown there
when you
touched my
head when on
your hand I saw
my blood
we each
of us without
pause or
conference
laughed in
time and for
the whole of
the moment still
left to us
let
ourselves as if
we had
a choice slowly
be
engulfed
by the falling
of a dozen
dozen
pale arpeggios
of dust
Charlie Clark was a 2019 NEA fellow in poetry and received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). His poetry has appeared in New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals.