This week we’re publishing a new poem by George David Clark. Clark has held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry at Colgate University and is currently a Lilly Postdoctorate Fellow at Valparaiso University. This winter his poems can be found in new issues of The Believer, Cream City Review, FIELD, New South, Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the editor of 32 Poems and lives in Indiana with his wife and son.
Reveille with Lullabies
Our sick son cries and cries and chokes on crying
till your gown that’s pink as gums is crying
And your breasts cry white on small pink nipples
a sleep-tinged white that’s cut with lead
In the dark the windows are crying
like thumb-damped handbells made of ice
And down the highway’s canyon fleets of sirens
Doppler by to strobe the room in cries of blue and red
*
If the colic was a creature thirsting in your son,
then you might sate it with your own wet voice,
your milky teaspoons of song.
You might reason with it, you might coax it out
with singing, if the hurt was conscious,
if the colic was a creature. Thirsting in your son,
you vine a melody around him as though to leach
the coursing poison out
and make of it an ornament, a full white flower
that could lure a moth out of the night, or colic,
if the colic was a creature thirsting. In your son
there is a redness, this hive of crying, a tightened
writhe of insect-sizzle, sucking
on his lungs. Now have you leaned to drip a lilting
in his ears as if your son was sponge for it, or as
if the colic was? A creature thirsting in, your son
looks through your song the way a bird looks
through a mist-fogged mirror
at a blur of feathers, world it cannot comprehend.
You wish his ears were polished windows because
if the colic was a creature thirsting in your son,
then you’d want it to see you coming, watch you
pick the locks of hearing
with your nimble tongue. You’d want it to know
who’d drowned it in a pool of lambent music,
if the colic was a creature thirsting in your son.
*
The infant’s cries are hollow
and they’re heated and prehensile
They’re the beaks of red mosquitos
and they’re ten-yards long and tensile
The two of us are fattened ears
pinkly slapped and ringing
The two of us are fattened ears
distinctly chapped and stinging
And the infant’s cries are siphons
spurting kerosene and diesel fuel
And the infant’s cries are acrid
where they’re pooling in the vestibule
One cry flicks a match on cradles
one plucks the smallest muscles
One cry sacks the ports of bedding
one routs the drowsing castles
We’re a pair of coal-black ears
decked in gypsies’ earrings
We’re a pair of cold-wracked ears
with flecks of sleet adhering
One cry tells the gridiron’s history
one’s ground and seared like cornbread
One cry spins us like rotisseries
in the big white furnace of our cry-torn bed
*
Your sleep dismantled by your son’s distress,
you’ve learned to wear his crying like a mantle.
You bless and bless him and his cries cry less.
How spillways hold their lakes against a ceaseless
draining off, you hold him till he samples
your sleep. What’s been dismantled by distress
becomes a blanket to the fretful guest
inside your ease. You light him like a candle.
You bless and bless him and his cries cry less.
How time holds broken clocks against her breast,
her haunted sons, you hold him. And why can’t all
the sleep that’s been dismantled by distress
be fashioned back together? You’d make a crèche
of it. You’d make that fractured rest a temple.
You bless and bless him and his cries. Cry less,
Mother, ample nightlights coalesce
until a keen attention bends to handle
your sleep. Dismantled is your son’s distress.
You bless and bless him and his cries cry less.
*
Because there’s not enough rest in the world
there’s not and won’t be enough waking
Yet you rise when something calls you out of bed
The night will thresh and thresh us till the lights
light less
And God will press and press us till our sighs
lie pressed
There’s not enough blessed in the world
we wake in
But your whispers are vanilla
in the shape of sharpened pencils
and you write our names delicious in our ears
Rise and bless us till our cries cry less
