10th Annual Juried Reading: Charlie Clark

10th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Charlie Clark

Charlie Clark has an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park, and has been published in Poems and Plays, Smartish Pace, English Journal, and other fine literary journals. His is currently a resident of Chicago.

Imagining the Sound of a Dirge for Moe

What are the vowels that best say the look of heat
      seeping from the railroad tracks that vanish
into the horizon? I want to find them
      and put them in a song for Moe, for them to be

how I observe her passing from our lives.
      It's the way a dirgy trumpet and tuba's sound
might be spelled, that wailing, mournful drone,
      though most would probably think of something

more ephemeral, therefore lighter and wispier in tone,
      but this is close to how the look sounds to me.
I want those vowels, those impossible, unmade
      letters that are just beyond conjuring in the deep

of my throat as I stand watching their ghost vapors
      quavering my view of the ground around me.
They are the tricky distraction I've given myself
      to focus too hard on, and find in them Moe's soul,

or something close to it, like the pink flowers
      the undertaker laid out, that Jack couldn't get beyond,
not just their fleeting beauty or how flowers always
      fill funerals with a funny, somber smell,

but the tremendous mechanics of their being here,
      the amount of land used for growing the flowers
we use to surround our dead, acres of them,
      whole flower islands, that become our mourning

hour's background. How these flowers are so
      connected to the sorrow of this day is what
I want from how the look of these vapors sound.
      The irreconcilability of how to say how

a look might sound or feel, how those senses mix,
      is the only paradox to surrender to, to think of them,
then, trails wailing up from the earth, almost
      but not quite saying adios to you, goodnight, adieu.