Missing Is a Stimulant

a circuit, bled memory a séance of the veins, a liquid hinge Deceit, the tones of dreamed sceneries defaced by a single face and yet the day itself is more marred by these traces of fragrance chances to fathom her absence or collapse with the sap of plants and sleep, and demand of a jasmine-scented face How are you still so fragrant? An object at a morgue or an organ

The Ghost Has No Home

This morning in an alleyway I was startled by a face
I seemed to recognize, in a dormer above a garage
and so slunk up to him, who was ranting quietly,
mauling the mind of some imagined ear out the pane
as if maligned, or high, like one
moony and almost witless in a poppy ditch,
or one waking ill and supine
in a wet bed of opening mullein:
“I have no desire to theorize language—
I was raised modestly and have sinned unspeakably.
I would rather waylay and destroy
whose voice molests me.”
On his desk a thin book I knew, a tragedy
whose residue was a Sentry’s couplet I half-knew
and began t

Jeff Clark

1997

Poems

Missing Is a Stimulant

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The Ghost Has No Home

Poems

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Missing Is a Stimulant

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The Ghost Has No Home

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