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02-09-2016
George David Clark
Jellyfish
The dark sea dreams them.
They are the inexchangeable
currency of dreams,
the interest the other world
pays and pays into this one.
In the pre-dawn blue
they seem hewn out
from the littoral like great
waterlogged diamonds,
an interior gleam.
Who speaks for them
speaks for the secret
side of the womb,
for they are the long-tasseled
death-bonnets of children
we conceive but never
bring to term. And so we love
and jointly curse them.
It is impossible now
to tell if they reach for us
or we for them, so strange
is their volatile gravity.
They are sisters
to the moon then, and pulse
in her wake, a curdled
blooming of echoes
as she too is an echo.
But in the fluorescent pink
and green pockets
of their bodies, softer
than night, they're smuggling
rumors of suns we fail
to imagine. They hold
whole oceans above
their umbrellas. Tell me,
friend, is there an end
to revelation? The poison
flowers blossom inside us
like Rorschachs
we might believe in.
Evening and thunderheads
in the austral sky,
the jellyfish tides,
an exhibition of lightnings
and scaled-down Hiroshimas:
if they proceed
like messengers,
another breed of angel,
then it falls on us to hear
and heed them,
their cold medusa-bells
resounding, calling us
back through the black
sand of sleep.
White Noise
The sound of the self, or the self's deletion?
Like wind tossing leaves of aluminum foil,
Sun-babble cooling in swirls of moon dust.
A sterilized music, a soothing unreason.
*
An atomized god, or a god's accretion?
The mind's swimming laps in Styrofoam peanuts,
In the latest decrees from the caucus of cretins.
Like birdsong in nightmare. The boiling of seas.
*
That sandpaper rasping of grief on grief:
Lobotomy's soundtrack, the curdle of semen.
We've amplified fog and made audible bleach.
The sound of our names in the dialect of demons.
Whatever Burn This Be
he had first a little cold so began to cough
then could not stop coughing could not
even at night willing the throat relaxed
while his wife sought rest beside him stop
as though there were a magician and this act
called for him to draw a chain of brightly-
colored handkerchiefs from out a humbled gullet
the itch of it the steady need in waves
to cough and somehow the handkerchiefs
continuing long after any ordinary feint
had been completed at the clinics coughing yet
while doctors snaked their special cameras
through his nose and raw esophagus
that high-tech scrutiny for polyps finding none
no profit from the chest exams
ditto prescription salves inhalers steroids weeks
and months of treatments with referrals each
to new physicians likewise confident
and ineffectual until what had seemed
some misdirection of contagion
then resembled more a sorcery of coughing
a kind of violent miracle and under
escalating cost and wrack of spasm
he commenced then dubiously begging
that a god he didn't half-believe existed
would touch with healing hand this throat
where the whole world's droughts were local
extinguish now whatever unslaked burn this be
he rasped his pleas aloud would sleep
and dream of coughing wake to coughing
and in hours closed to anything but thought
and coughing he imagined himself
magistrate among the scalded throats
of Mexico the boys expectorating fire
for tourists till the inevitable night
that flash they spit they swallow
too he dwelt on Colombian neckties
desecrations whereby throats are opened
and the tongue jerked down jerked
throbbing forth to dry like suffering's ascot
would think romantically of a torturer's
garrote the metal coolness on an Adam's apple
even as the victim choked and more
cruel still he dreamed himself
hauled out on stage by this magician-sadist
his body locked from the neck down
in a rough wood box while whetted coughs
like saw blades slit and split him
who he wondered watched this
from the soundless gallery he couldn't see
for heaven clearly to his slow sere prayers
was silent just as he foreknew it would be
and further-yet despairing then
he entertained the staid analysis
of certain liquid suicides a meditation
on the image of a man relaxing poolside
in the ruthless prime of summer
sweating glass of antifreeze beside him
or the slow black drip of motor oil
into the grinding cog-works of his chassis
saw such tonics more like spells
or counter-curses by which he might pit
cough vs industry and all the best
combustion human beings have devised
he spit goddamn and now he meant it
O could not stop this ceaseless Santa Ana
within his precious windpipe chambered
so he coughed and cursed
gave in to coughing lavished
in that millisecond fraction of relief inside
each cough like thimble-shots of nectar
in a cactus coughed though surely each balm
broke on deeper coughing no longer spoke
but croaked or hissed poor throat scoured
throat blistered flayed excoriated throat
and still in addition to prescription-everything
tried homemade syrups tried honey tried
lemon-rose-holy-spring-and-salt water
a couple times counter-intuitive bouts
of better whiskies tried tequila with chilled
V-8 chasers tried to sandblast the throat
and start again from nothing always bags
of mentholated lozenges always ice-cold
carbonated anything and yet the constant
curdle of his larynx such that finally knee-wise
bent again for supplication half-swearing
half-whispering like carnal secrets his appeals
for simple peace to pain itself
mindlessly whimpering there for draught
of anything to ease this long red rash
of perfect coughing then
then like someone finally told the story
of a scar they'd worn since infancy
his cough seemed simultaneously more
and less a myth and he began suspecting
as his thoughts turned odd he might at last
be hearing a reply that if transcendent coughs
like his existed so must god a god
much stranger than he'd guessed that maybe
angled properly the noise he made
this ultimate ugliness could strike the ears
of paradise in a way no prayer could hope to
that to soothe a genius cough like his
he might start thinking like a throat
an instrument of coughing he might
become a smarter kind of cough
productive of something curiously beautiful
ordained a consecrated cougher who
by saint-like coughing harder with more pure
hurt behind it might cough up the cure
for something cough precious stones or cough
a beam of whole white light cough out
the worst parts of himself until he was
another man entirely revival fire
and brimstone coughing gospel coughing
on a stage to wild amens coughing to end
wars and famines and coughing too to call
the necessary rain lakes of it cataracts
and pearly Caribbeans of deluge coursing
blessedly the cool blue throat of an evening sky
could a new cough clean him
could he be sanctified by long apocalyptic
coughing would hurt men come to him
asking meekly that he please cough for them
cough please over them so god might
through him hear their own hidden
and inarticulate hackings voiced the way
they felt them that the lord might disburse
his mercy please sir cough they'd softly say
and moved he would in thick bellowing fits
of messianic coughing cough for them
cough kindly over them throw back his head
and let go coughs like a magician's
plump white doves an endless stream in flight
toward heaven that cracked and ragged
blessing through his crimson throat forever
-from Reveille: Poems
BIO: George David Clark was born in Savannah and raised in Chattanooga and Little Rock. He now lives in Washington, PA with his wife, Elisabeth, and their three young children.
The author of Reveille (winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press), David’s recent poems can be found or are forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, Blackbird, CincinnatiReview, The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Earlier work appears reprinted at Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and in a variety of anthologies and special series.
After earning an MFA at the University of Virginia and a PhD at Texas Tech University, David held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry at Colgate University and, later, the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship at Valparaiso University. He’s received additional honors from Southern Poetry Review (the Guy Owen Prize), Narrative Magazine (the 30 Below Prize), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (a Walter E. Dakin fellowship), among others. The current editor-in-chief of 32 Poems, he previously served in various capacities on the staffs of Meridian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Iron Horse Literary Magazine, and the Best New Poets anthology. David now teaches creative writing and literature as an assistant professor at Washington & Jefferson College.
