Kevin Clark

Rue

—My father, Grover, and The Globe, 1952

It can’t be sepia that writes my love for them
all over again. I’ve fancied my poems
stout against the drool of sentiment
that makes a hard man collapse over a beer
at a sports bar when his middling team has won
despite the odds Vegas posted in a laugh—

I wasn’t the kind of guy who succumbs
to the bulge of grief at the back of his throat
when the movie strings crescendo, the mother
finding her kid after three nights, alive
with his retriever in the woods, the curtains
crossing the screen as quickly as childish

rue. So how can a photo undo all I know about
the taut craft of loss?  Good men cracking
wise on the empty infield in their weekend
sweats: Grover’s lost bet, the wincing smile,
his team down in defeat, The Globe giving him
the five-finger salute behind a waggish puss

while snatching the one-spot, my father’s arm
wrapping Grover’s shoulder in mock comfort—
and that’s the sad rub, yes? How the comic
Bronx plosives of long-gone men in love
with a game and each other return to flood me
despite the would-be shield of my art. 

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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.