Kevin Clark

Fuselage

The viscous paste-colored solution slid
down the plane window, and minutes later
the translucence of de-icing had given way
to a topmost shatter of cloud cover shot
with sun. I stared like a novice
at the light show, three miles high,
the fog-bound groping giving way
to jet speed beauty. My usual low-key fear
of flying slipped under for a while.
When we’d risen to cruise the space-blue
realm of 30,000 feet, another
old feedback loop spoke up, how
I used to worry through essays
on the death of the author, that a text
is a construct of a billion forces
built by slave ants in an art show
of deterministic physics, the author
only an inflated tent, my thinking housing
a thousand shifting impulses, a trillion
crystal pellets splashing the plane’s window
before the next wave of particles, some
passing through me, some entincturing
the red band of sunset three hours later
over the Rockies, now nothing but
a darkening lavender, then the last smear
of dusk—and we’re past.
At home, my wife
is just now closing her book, calling
the kids out to the car, I know they’re
coming to greet me, to take me home,
as if in the endless, shifting, states-long
wheat fields, I can see a few tassels
change direction, wave for me against
the grain of wind. Pressed against
the runway fence, she’ll wave back.
Yet with cool assent, the essays could
undo these harmonies. No grace, no poem.
Later, later this night, as I sink
from the altitudes into her, no love,
all atomized. But for now I lead the essays
to their own sleep, and as they doze
in their material ecstasies, whispering
all their nothings to the other older books
still at home on my night table, they go
the path of the useless and delirious.
Or I do. No telling. I dream and wake.
In descent, the blue lights of the city
shiver in the starboard windows.
The tent inflates imperceptibly.
Giant tires accept the earth.

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Kevin Clark’s third volume of poems The Consecrations is published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. A second book, Self-Portrait with Expletives, won the Pleiades Press prize, while his first collection, In the Evening of No Warning, earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets. He’s published poems in the Southern, Georgia, Iowa, and Antioch reviews, Crazyhorse, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, etc. New poems are forthcoming in Copper Nickel and The Georgia Review. His poetry is anthologized in Keener Sounds: Selected Poems from The Georgia Review and The Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years. The Literary Review’s Angoff Award winner, he is a former critic for The Georgia Review. His essays also appear in The Iowa Review, The Southern Review and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Director of the creative writing program at Cal Poly for many years, he also taught at the low-residency Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma. He lives in San Luis Obispo, CA.