Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Clary, Killarney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022617798X ISBN 13: 9780226177984

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time. The details on which Clary chooses to focus suggest a narrative that will not resolve. The unnamed people with whom she interacts offer exchanges she is desperate to prolong, and in attempts to understand her place, she reaches beneath the fragile armor of those loved, especially those who can no longer answer her. This quietly haunting book, remarkable for its subtlety and delicacy, is Clary’s strongest, most engaging work to date and amply shows her to be a master of this lyric genre.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Killarney Clary is the author of three poetry collections: Who Whispered Near Me, By Common Salt, and Potential Stranger, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. She lives in Aptos, California.

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Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud

By Killarney Clary

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-17798-4

CHAPTER 1

Through a panel of controls in the post-Panamax crane cab, the container is raised from the ship and set on a trailer from which it will be transferred, at the intermodal yard, to a train through the Alameda Corridor. Switched through to the Inland Empire and beyond—the clothing, electronics, and toys from Asia are on their way.

From the warehouse in Sparks, Nevada, to fill a catalog order in Emmett, Idaho—a blouse for a woman who will be better when the parcel has arrived. Summer's coming. She slits the tape, unfolds the pale tissue, lifts the thing. Dust on the dresser, powder on her throat, a fine quiet glow on what she has gathered, and a siffle in the blinds, heat leaning on the outside wall of the dim bedroom. The color is different from what she expected. She pulls her shirt off, feels a tingling surge of shortfall behind her eyes.

We watched ravens ransack the truck-stop trashcans, plastic blowing across the blacktop out onto the desert, catching on fence wire, blooms of Styrofoam in the tumbleweed. As long as we were not speaking, I wouldn't hear what I was afraid you'd say. I wouldn't say the words I'd be sorry for. Doesn't the wind need to rest? A motley sparrow turned his working, calico eye to the sun, heated the mites then dusted them. Tending to himself, he looked bad.

There is nothing said to her from which she does not shy. Another word will come, irritate delicate privacy. Seen parts, well formed, finished, don't give. She will not give way. The sores of our voiced care she tends with long rests, rising in the afternoon for a drink of water.

When her mother dares, You promised to eat, she is silent. Help is arranged and she goes along with it. Help is a sad song playing in the background. Distance clothes her cooling body, promises to keep her, like dry ice, ever without the middle part.

He pressed his fingertips on the rim of the coffee mug, let up. I want to know what THIS is. He swore he wouldn't settle for belief. We ate sandwiches and he went away.

Trucks pass on the highway around the lake. Stuff is transferred at every hour, pottery fired, racked, packed in custom cartons to keep down damage, to eliminate rattle. The enterprise narrows to a delivery at my door. Box opened, the vase rests on its own against my hand.

His question moves up my arm, one cell against the next relaying uneasy wonder. Jet Skis on the lake, summer in the tall yellow grass. THIS is, each tick, the Good night we nod as we cross—greeting and goodbye.

The matter resists my touch. The world resists my thinking. Maybe he stopped. Maybe he broke his resolve, gave himself over to involuntary muscles to keep from choking on the stream of marvel.

She taped a note for me on her window, and I one in return; she answered. Now I am expected and will do anything else. If there were another place to look, a periphery, I might bear a thing said and then the waiting. She is four years old, watching my window, and I am counting. If handing over and standing still weren't a trap.

I see through the glass the glare on ornaments. Her Christmas tree was cut to be this exactly, to last as this. Needles dry and drop. We might become friends, set these houses adrift, refuse to promise.

When she stops at the two-thousand-year-old body she is silent. Can she think of her apple in a bag on the bus? We will pass to the next dimly lit exhibit—darkness protects the weave and finish—then to peppy questions about magic, and a wishing well at the end in the light. Here, a vial of berry seeds eaten twenty centuries ago, a leather rag. I look and look away through the north door to a pavilion where butterflies scatter in the April afternoon. I've noted the exits, measured the hour. What I learn catches on what I already know. Her damp fingers trail, lift away from the glass. For her, too, the forms harden.

A four-sided traffic light hangs above the intersection, swaying, dim through the dust. No cars. It changes. Four flat treeless streets reach four horizons. After ten years the woman says, I never loved you.

Red train across the Mojave, rose quartz glitter rises in drafts against the mountains, curls back to fall in dunes. Ocotillo whistles for the wind all night. No place. Called waste.

His hand barely against his shirtfront, he leans forward to smell the bitterbrush. Bees. Late sun on the red rock, dark in the deep verticals, engine idling. How can I tell what it is to be alive? Why do we say love, or paint pictures of a limestone outcropping? When he climbs back into the truck he leans against me. What is weight? The cab smells like honey.

If we hadn't kissed goodbye a second time, the car coming off the freeway at the Vine Street exit would have hit me.

I am careful when trees move without wind. Careful of what? The dead love me. The evil ones have not secured my signature and must remain attractive. They will not hurt us.

You say the only thing you want now is for me to worry less. You remind me where we sat yesterday, across the ravine, on that ridge. See?

As long as the edge of the chair's shadow touches the doorframe, we are alive.

The girl falls in love and wants to be well, is well, and forgets to measure. She is noticed or not in the supermarket by the boy she met at last night's party. The day is bright; she hears thunder, and mist sprinklers come on above the lettuce. Bitterly, the word comes—Silly. She is chilled and losing. The list is numbered. Each shape and color announces at once it is against her and at her service. To keep from reeling, she could use her telephone. Her hand is lax on the cool lemon.

Worry touches the loaded brush tip to the wetted paper and the color floods into a sharp-edged shape, darkens to be a thing, my own. Want draws a picture, so the strain is milked.

You smoothed my hair. Your big fingers combed, caught, pulled away so as not to feel the rough spot too long; it was long enough for me to know you had felt it and wonder if you were repulsed. You moved on. I haven't had this thought.

You came into the room where the two of us were talking and you looked only at her. I am not thinking this. I won't say. I will dress in red next time.

Pigeons nest in the crooks of neon tubes above the man doubled over at the pay phone who presses 9-1-1 for himself while the cop nearby pats down a bored boy. When the ambulance comes, the Metro Rail crowd crosses anyway in front of it, so the paramedics wait.

Hollywood and Western. How thick a medium will we share? Static crackles—a moist breath in contact with heat. Where'd she get the money? Wind kicks dust off last year's burn. Ruby glass casts a red shadow. The woman in the wheelchair accepts with a sigh the weight of her caretaker's head on her shoulder.

I say downtown's beautiful at night. But on Saturdays he drives a cab. What I've seen. He closes his eyes and fists. I leave him off and head home toward the sparkle, over the four-level stack, this time suspecting that in the dark shafts between the blocks there is a driver whose fare is a perfect fourteen-year-old Guatemalan girl handing him a Beverly Hills address. He can't word the question. She shakes her head, pays him quickly, and drops, glinting, into the deep.

My practice of leaving throbs in the carpet's design. While you talk, shapes spin then settle—bats in a cave. The city whir and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022617798X
• ISBN 13: 9780226177984
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 70
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar