Timpanogos:
Another Look
They always see you lying there, Sleeping
Lady, hands softly crossed under virgin breast,
Head somewhat lower and vague in profile,
Knees slightly flexed, just enough to form an image
Of eternal repose.
But the image never seems to form for me
In outline rough against the sky.
Winter white can soften gray of summer rock,
But even winter shows too little of feminine
In your jagged angles.
Somehow today I see you, though, sharpened
By late afternoon sun, softened by afternoon cloud.
But--yes--you're standing!
Of course it's just a fancy, you couldn't really stand
Such proportions fit only for parody. It must be flames
Of white on white
Sun-whitened to suggest a virgin's spirit-whitened blouse
With winter gray and russet skirt billowing widely down.
Legs and feet would have to stretch
Below the level of outland seas.
Above, an even whiter necklace of cloud
Catches and throws back a living white,
God's own light--pulsing white to make
My eyes blink black.
Is that the reason I can see no head
Projecting high and proud into blue that could not be so blue
Without the white? Projecting through the blue
To such white that only as we climb like Dante
And know our eyes tempered to spiritual sight
Can we see the white?
I will like the fancy even when it fades
And you lie back uneasily to eternal repose I cannot see.
Eternal repose for them, eternal myth for them and me:
But no scapegoat, Lady. Not for me. No sacrificial maiden
To carry on that breast eternally our valley's sins
--They're not a Lady's burden now
Nor ever were.
But now I've seen you standing there
You'll find no peace from me. I'll always see
You standing there, eternal myth of unseen eyes
That flash and search and stretch up there
And stretch my own and stretch my
All up there: eternal quest
For God's own light.
--Marden J Clark
From Moods: of Late, Brigham Young University
Press, 1980, 62-3
My father could never quite see
the maiden on Timpanogos, whether her head was on the north end or
south, so he wrote a poem about her instead.
Return
Krista Therapy
I feel the firm dance of your hands
across knots
of my back partly softened and
smoothed with intens-
ive care feel your special attention
to spots
"Born of an old egg," you joked to your mother.
Close on forty years she nurtured that egg
To become you, with the help of a cell from old
Dad, enough of a twist to determine you daughter.
along the sharp twists of my spine
where no sense
of what-a-good-spine-ought-to-be can
be found
i feel the hard knots letting go you
dispense
The living dance: a wriggling heat-seeking
sperm,
An unwilled rolling willing receptive egg:
The tenuous blind dance of life to life.
Uniting then dividing. Organs play
As double helix becomes organic you.
your warmth a suffusing soft glow
without sound
that filters through bones lungs and
heart to my chest
warms organs deeper than that
ultra-sound
You! To open by pangs the windows of heaven
And let them pour generous milk to nurture,
As you would nurture our age, to fill the golden
Promise of your scanty hair, the pure
Dark depths and azure surface of your eyes.
machine with no delicate life in its
breast
can reach but your ultra-sound hands
need to knead
tense endings of nerves now release
by request
Our other five had taught us the delicacy
Of dancing the wavering line between nurture and
spoilage.
Our feet slipped often on the spoiling slope,
Such slips as only sharpened the textured grain
Of your love: We tried; you would not spoil.
the knots they're all gone as if they
had agreed
your being just being and being with
us
would ever be therapy all we could
need
So here you are: Krista miraculous
Matured in a profession unusually arduous
A healer whose hands have earned your borrowed name
you plunged into paradox filling its
promise
of finding in nurturing patients with
knots
yourself mature now in a love beyond
us
--Marden
J Clark
Return
Snows
That snow falling out there, not in flakes
But in clusters of flake, little snow balls
Loosened by November's sun still barely struggling
Through the harvest haze, snow falling
From all the trees we planted and nurtured,
The moraine locust, bare now of leaves,
Its dark branches almost writhing, twisting
Like a maiden's arms in distress, stretching out
And up and down, unsure of where
They want to end. The crab, flowering
In pure white, not the purple-pink of spring.
The aspens we dug almost as twigs
From their mountain grove and thrilled
To watch them put out buds then leaves.
From all these, our private forest, the snow drops,
Or peels in long graceful curves from taut wires,
Sometimes large loose balls trailing fine crystals.
Now a light breeze stirs still-clinging
Apple leaves and looses a shower, the crystals drifting
Toward our patio.
A robin lights on a branch,
A dozen robins, then a score of cedar waxwings:
A blizzard of snow, a blizzard of birds.
A second storm lovelier than the first,
Grace after grace.
--Marden J.
Clark
Cedar
Waxwings
To brighten an already snow-bright sunbright
January day, they arrive in clouds
So dense our winter-bare trees come alive
Leaved anew with large brown-gold leaves
Fluttering in no-breeze. They fall and dart
And rise singly or in dozens. Suddenly
The whole flock takes off in a whirr
We can hear through tight windows. We watch
As they wheel over roofs to light on trees
Nearly out of sight.
Our ceiling floats,
Ceiling and roof in one. Clerestory windows
On both sides of southern rooms make bright
Light flow and float both beams and finish pine.
I hear another whirr and then a thud,
Look out to see a window marked with bird,
The bird shivering on cold concrete. The trees
Again live with birds. I walk out
To pick him up, watch the flock wheel again.
Cupped in my hands he shudders
Only slightly. I take him inside.
The birds return, drawn by the orange
Of crabapples still clinging to our tree
And cluttering the concrete. Brown birds peck
At the apples, even scratch through snow
To those in the grass, dart from apple
To aspen, from walnut to locust, some wobbling
In flight, from too much
Liquor brewed in tiny apples.
Again they wheel away, leave trees bare.
Then a thud, a rush of thuds. We look up:
Birds against the sky darken the high windows
We hear then see more thuds as birds
Try the floating light.
The flock lands in our tree again;
We only sit sobered till they leave.
I climb to the roof, crunch through snow
And gather them, two score still warm
Chick-bodies into plastic bucket--
Bodies that followed light not the sun,
Waxwings limp and broken not melted.
One still flutters. I leave him in the house,
In a pasteboard box, add the one that has died,
Take the bucketful down to my garden,
Hack through snow and frozen crust
And bury them en masse.
My corn will grow rich over the grave.
--Marden J Clark
Return
Sunset
"Sure purty, ain't it."
Called across grass, his words could only
Desecrate the truth and desecrate my thoughts and mood.
But what words, then,
Words to define that lovely light?
Chiaroscuro in technicolor?
Edging those clouds a red gold glow that makes our mountains glow?
Refracted light from sun at edge of cloud?
Light wavering per second at upwards of seven thousand angstroms?
Beauty, beauty because we're there to see?
No words—I find none.
None that catch and hold a sky thus caught
And held by light. Caught and held to catch
And hold my breath, to catch and hold in awe
The sweep of sky, and eye.
If no words, there are only he and I—
And all the rest. We see. We sense, we come to know
And love the light, that play of sunset light.
Words fade. He's faded out. The light fades now,
Now that I see how much we share.
"Sure purty, ain't it."
—Marden J Clark
From Moods: of Late, Brigham Young
University Press, 1980, 53.
Return
Birds and Bees
Bess was only mildly excited when she called
me to come and look at something out on
our front porch. What I saw was hardly worthy of the trip. Suspended
from the ends of the beams
she had hung two bird feeders, partially filled with sweetened water.
Not much seemed to be
happening. Then she directed my attention to a bee crawling around on
one of the feeders, an
innocent enough action, though it appeared that the bee had discovered
some sweetness around
one of the feeder holes.
"Just wait," she said. Sure enough, in just a
moment here came a very busy little humming
bird. Little, that is, for a humming bird. But very large compared to
the bee. The bird poked its
long beak, made to reach into the heart of flowers and suck nectar out,
into one of the feeder
holes. It stayed there for several seconds, seeming to stand on air but
with its wings fluttering so
fast that all we could see was a blur. Then we saw the bee move toward
the bird. That was all we
could see; the feeder blocked our view. The bird suddenly sped away on
those whirring wings.
It came back a minute or so later and tried
again. This time the bee moved faster, and the
bird fled again. The action became a strange little minuet. The bee
seemed content to let the bird
get its beak into one of the feeder holes, then it either stung the
bird or did something that made it
fly away.
I dismissed Bess's suggestion that here was
matter enough for an "Unorganized" column.
But the suggestion wouldn't go away. Surely a dance like that had
something important to tell us
about the world of insects and small birds, and hence about ourselves.
Well, like most subjects for a writer, it had
to do its own germinating. It's almost exactly
twenty-four hours later as I write this, and the germinating has gone
on long enough at least to
get me this far: a convenient stopping place.
The result is that I began to see the minuet
as something far more complicated and
significant than it had seemed.
If I were a thorough-going Darwinist, I might
have to see it as a miniature version of
"nature red in tooth and claw." I suppose the bee could somehow have
stung the bird, maybe even
killed it. (If a bee sting can make my arm or leg swell up, as I've had
it do, then the venom would
probably kill a humming bird, unless it had some kind of built-in
protection.) But the bee seemed
concerned only to have the bird gone. I don't believe the bee flew away
even once, though there
were other bees around. None, though, was bothering either bird or bee.
There were other humming birds around, too,
though only one other approached our
feeder. The bee apparently did something to make the bird stay away.
There was no evidence of
the bee starting to build a hive, or of inviting other friends to share
in her store of sweets. One
could see her as a totally selfish creature, unable to more than sample
the nectar but unwilling to
call in friends. A sort of dog in the manger, unable to eat much but
unwilling to share.
If this isn't a good enough lesson from my
bird and bee, then I'll just have to go back to
my Aesop and find a better one. Or maybe to my Bible.
--Marden J Clark
My father wrote a newspaper column for Provo's Daily Herald for almost 8 years, from
late 1994
till late 2002. This was column 346 for July 21, 2001, and here's
another one, column 391 for 25 May 2002.
Humming Bird
Heaven
Last Monday evening Bess and I sat on our porch
settee/swing and enjoyed, as we often
do, the evening closing in (or the day closing out). It began even
before the sun went down: the
humming birds darting between our two feeders then off to tend to their
own evening business.
They are strange little fellows, with their long projecting bills, made
just to suck nectar from
flowers but easily adapted to suck it from our feeders.
We probably had three or four birds. But we were
able to recognize only two, one by its
standard gray coating but belligerent behavior, the other by its
beautiful ruby-red throat. One bird
would dart in and scare or drive the other away. He made an unusual
soft clicking sound. The
other made only the hum of those wings in something like perpetual
motion. Both the birds, and
perhaps one or two others, were very active in defending their
territories. They darted between
the two feeders, or off to whatever private destination, darting at
each other only as hunger
seemed to dictate. But what intrigued us most was the way they could
stand on air, almost
motionless except for the constant but almost silent whir of wings.
Some years ago we stopped north of San Francisco to
see my old high school friends, Sam
and Barbra Burton. They were comfortably settled in a lovely home, but
the thing we remember is
the hive of activity from humming birds along their back porch. They
must have had at least a half
dozen feeders with a half dozen birds contesting for each feeder. It
was probably very peaceful in
spite of the whir of activity along the row of feeders. Sam and Barbra
were obviously enjoying
both show and showing it off to us, almost as much as we did for the
short time we were there.
Much as we enjoyed watching their show with them, I
think I enjoy more the miniature
show that’s become almost a nightly fare for us. We just sit back and
enjoy.
But their darting back and forth, often in apparent
anger at each other and each prepared
to defend his territory with his beak creates a nightly diversion, made
the more interesting for us
as we gradually come to recognize some individuality of several of
them. It’s all too easy to
recognize something universal in their antics, especially as they use
so much vigor defending
themselves from an imagined threat or enemy. Humans can’t seem that
active nor overtly that
concerned about anyone else encroaching on their territory. We tend to
hide behind our veneer of
civilization, maybe trying to settle differences in heavy-handed but
slow-moving courts.
But when those fail, watch out. Our courts remind us
that the mills of the gods grind slow,
but they grind exceeding fine. Maybe the worst thing about them is that
they grind out hatred at
least as often as they grind out justice. And they run on the fuel of
anger. We seldom see that
anger–we’re good at keeping it hidden. But one of the conventions of
the courtroom is a formal
politeness that leaves much room for acrimony to hide behind. I’d
rather have what seems to be
the very busy openness of the birds as they struggle for a bit more of
their share of the nectar than
the formal politeness that often masks the bitterness behind our court
battles.
--Marden
J Clark
Return
Build
It Yourself
"Just go to work and build yourself a home."
You made it sound so easy, Lloyd, with all
Your skills and confidence: "Just find a lot,
Draw up some plans, lay out the house, then call.
I"ll come and help." We did, you did. But you
Forgot to tell: about permits--permits
To build, to wire, to plumb, to lay a sewer line;
How hard concrete can be, how fast it sets;
How I could never drive a nail or screw;
How wood can warp and wiring circuits short;
How sheetrock seldom fits nor spackle fills;
How plumbing leaks and wood once cut won’t stretch.
But with your help and help from many more--
Both volunteered and sought--we found such powers
To build: we finally had a home. Not big,
No fancy gables, no stately dome--but ours.
We loved it, small as it was, but four short years,
Two children more--we had to have more room.
It took no mystic inner voice to hear:
"Just go to work and build yourself a home."
We did again: with homeseekers group we bought
A lot in lower Oak Hill. We’d earned
Before the skills to build on larger scale
With larger problems too, as we soon learned.
A fire--Satan-set--burned heart from home
And us. But friends soon showed what friends
Are for, helped us rebuild and taught us gratitude.
A decade this one lasted before our ends,
Rough-hewn by Harlow, sanded smooth by Krista,
Pointed, post-doctoral, toward more room--
Our skills would build us out of doctoral debt:
"Just go to work and build yourself a home."
Instead, we built us deeper in, but built
With surer skills. We’ve learned too much. We’ll come
One day to hear a soft celestial voice:
"Just go to work and build yourself a home."
--Marden J Clark
No, my father didn't build this
building, but I do like the idea of reusing an old building rather than
using new resources to put something in its place. This poem was
published in the Summer 2003 issue (5:2) of Irreantum, just after he died.
Return
Besides designing an occasional website and writing a more occasional
poem Harlow Soderborg Clark (harlowclark@comcast.net) writes and edits
whatever he can. He has written technical materials for translators,
and marketing and reference materials, and has compiled and edited
phone directories, textbooks and scholarly publications. For 5 years he
covered Lindon, Utah and nearby towns for local newspapers, with
hundreds of full length stories and features and hundreds of briefs,
over 1,000 news stories all told. (He thinks often about Anthony
Burgess's comment in the foreward to an annotated bibliography of his
work about being astonished at how much he had to write to make a
living for his family, and not a very good living at that.) From
1999-2004 he served as the first poetry editor for Irreantum, where he published the following
essay in the Summer 2003 issue after Marden Clark's death. Harlow blogs
at A Motley Vision.
Seeking Straunge Strondes
The Pilgrimage of Marden J. Clark
By Harlow Clark
Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
--Geoffrey Chaucer
This year Aprilles shoures came late, around the
first of May, so it is fitting that Marden J. Clark
(born July 13, 1916) took his pilgrimage, and his pilgrimage took him,
on May 15, 2003.
Marden began his autobiography, Awake at Four, “I
wonder at what point along the way Odysseus
realized that he was on an epic quest.” Marden’s was more an epic
pilgrimage. He never blinded an
inhospitable host, and though nearly eaten by a sow as a baby, he never
dallied with the sow-keeper.
Perhaps he listened to the siren song, holding firmly to the iron mast.
But mostly what he did, like the
Canterbury pilgrims, was to walk and swap stories with fellow and
sister travelers.
Bessie first, walking him over the Hollywood hills
in 1942 to put herself into labor with their first
child, Diane. Dennis, Sherri, Kevin and Harlow followed, and in 1960,
the year Diane and Sherri dumped
the cookbook into the Thanksgiving gravy (their mother being in the
hospital to be delivered of Krista), they
moved into a home Marden had built in the lower foothills a mile east
of BYU.
Built far enough to move into. It took a few years
to finish everything. I remember the ShopSmith
set up in the living room, 4 or 5 feet long, and shaped a bit like a
gymnastic horse with two sets of parallel
bars running the length to move the saw up and down for cutting various
sizes. (Dennis showed me years
later that one end was hinged and you could stand the bars up on end
and use the motor as a drill press). It
was the third or fourth he had built, on advice from Bessie’s brother,
Lloyd, “Just go to work and build
yourself a home.”
Because the Wasatch fault runs a block east of the
house there is still a large section of
undeveloped foothills nearby, where Marden and Bessie walked and toured
the developing upper foothills.
About 10 years later Agda and Leroy Harlow moved in
up the street and were soon walking the
foothills with Marden and Bessie. Only coincidence in our names. My
parents simply wanted an unusual
name, and Google tells me there are only 6 other Harlow Clarks. I heard
about one over Memorial Day
weekend when a woman at church in Challis, Idaho, said she had a cousin
by that name down in Oakley,
near Almo, where my cousin Gary Steed bred potatoes, who had been (of
course) this woman’s daughter’s
bishop at Ricks College.
Got home and took the car into the shop. “Harlow
Clark. Isn’t that the name of the guy who
stopped us in Oakley? We were out tp-ing someone’s house and he was
having a meeting inside and saw it
and he was a firefighter and had red lights on his car so he jumped in
and chased us with his lights flashing.
We thought we were goners. If we’d been older than 16 we might have
realized it wasn’t a police car and
not stopped.”
But I digress. Of course, digression is what makes a
pilgrimage interesting. Dante’s wouldn’t have
been nearly so entertaining without the lion she-wolf and leopard
forcing a digression. (Were there not 10
leopards? Where are the nine?)
Digressions make travel and long talks across
the foothills with friends worthwhile. Bessie
Boulevards Marden called the dusty mountain roads he took at Bessie’s
whim. After retiring they traveled.
The Holy Land and the Book of Mormon lands (what pilgrims could
resist?), Africa, India, China where
they taught a year at the University of Qing Dao under invitation from
BYU’s Kennedy Center for
International Relations. Every continent except Antarctica, which they
saw from shipboard in Patagonia.
And once while they were away, LeRoy Harlow tramped
off on his own pilgrimage and Marden
and Bessie’s walking contracted, and as Agda’s Parkinson’s got worse
they lost another traveler. They still
climbed Squaw Peak on their 49th anniversary, but Marden had started to
slow down, and by their 60th
they would walk a couple of blocks to Briar, down the hill, around the
block, back up the hill, back home.
And even those walks shortened, like David Lyon’s
nearly blind walks across the street. Col. Lyon
came to Provo in the late 60s, his last Army assignment, to set up
BYU’s ROTC program. “Mother was
worried,” Michael Lyon told me, “because he had a very strong
personality and so did Ernest Wilkinson.”
On retirement Col. Lyon joined BYU’s administration in public
relations, where, his son Phillip told me, it
was once his duty to tell Ezra Taft Benson, another very strong
personality, that a politician he very much
wanted to speak at BYU would not be invited.
David Lyon was a staunch Republican, Marden Clark a
committed lukewarm Democrat who
offended his neighbor by the phrase “hoopla at the County Courthouse,”
in a newspaper column describing
his youthful indifference to Decoration Day in Morgan, Utah.
Marden wrote another column the next week, about a
family whose Memorial Day tradition was
placing a rosebud floating in a plastic cup on each grave in the
children's section of the Provo cemetery.
And he brought the column around to his offense. "His gentle
chastising, together with his appreciation for
the rest of the [last week’s] column, made me re-live what those
celebrations had really meant. David
helped change my past as well as my present."
The two had a lot of past in common, though they
never met before the Lyons moved in, and they
celebrated that common past one day in the parking lot after church.
Springtime or summer. probably April
after rain. Why else would they both start reciting the Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales in Middle English
remembered 40 years since high school? And they shared a few words
lamenting what the younger
generation was missing by not having those words in memory, or the
memory of having committed them to
memory.
And one day David Lyon suffered a stroke, as his
wife Cherie had about 10 years earlier. She
recovered some speech, the word "Beautiful," and could sing, and
continued to bless her family for several
years. Michael said at her funeral that she had recovered the most
important word, as her life was given to
creating beauty.
David's stroke was more serious, and when I heard
about it I should have been more diligent to ask
about his health. As with Agda my parents forgot to tell me he had died
until after the funeral.
Finally a few months later, several, I sought
Michael out and apologized for not having said
something earlier. "It's all right," he said. I told him the story of
our fathers reciting Chaucer. "You've given
me a great gift," he said. Imagine that. A story a gift. Words about
people reciting words, a gift.
Insubstantial words, sound that fades almost instantly, a gift that can
travel through time surviving the
death of the means that transmitted it. Imagine.
Marden had many stories to tell and as we traveled
from Finland to England in the summer of 1971
after his time as a Fulbright (love the connotations of that word, he
said) professor at the University of
Oulu Krista and I fought for the seat behind the driver’s in the VW
Vanagon we had picked up in Westfalia
9 months earlier.
Odysseus, Agamemnon, the Gods found breath from his
mouth as we drove up Mount Olympus,
climbed the Acropolis, visited Mycenae.
Marden spent much of his last 9 years writing a
religion column for the Daily Herald, telling
stories about people he met on his walks, about family, and sunsets and
dreams and our national leopards.
And sometimes he talked about his literary
pilgrimages. As a critic Marden also told stories. He
could do complex analysis, but preferred to write for a general
audience, a literary pilgrim, whose model
for organizing literature was Dante Alighieri’s tour of Hell, Purgatory
and Heaven. Like Virgil guiding
Dante safely through Hell and up to Mount Purgatory so art and
literature could guide us safely through
Hell and into the presence of our Beatrice.
Dante rode Virgil's back down those mighty
haunches
Through the ice past zero gravity of being
And began the purgatorial climb.
We might make the same journey
Marden wrote in "November 22, 1963--And After." I rode those haunches
past my own zero gravity of
being, but as he slowed and became a very old man (younger than several
uncles who lived to be 99 and
100+) Marden's mighty haunches became less able to bear and he needed a
back to rest on.
"Help, I've lost my column." I could count on a
Tuesday afternoon call as he organized his Matter
Unorganized. He had forgotten how to make WordPerfect do something
simple like bold a word, or had
inadvertently dragged a directory into another directory while trying
to retrieve a file. "Do I have e-mail?"
he asked several times after having used it several years to send his
column to the Herald.
"Don't be impatient with me," he said once. Mostly
it was the frustration of trying to explain over
the phone something I could do in seconds in person. And the pain of
seeing a brilliant mind remember how
to write, but lose grasp of the complex programs that replaced
typewriter, stamp and envelope.
Bessie never has grasped the idea of a computer, but
she loves to write. She showed me a rejection
slip from the Improvement Era for some doggerel she wrote in the late
‘30's, before Marden. Perhaps we
owe his writing to a blind date. He didn’t set out to be a writer. Went
down to Los Angeles during the war
and trained as a draftsman at Lockheed.
Took his family back home to Morgan after the war,
didn’t want to spend his life bent over a
drafting table. Bessie didn’t want him to spend his life on the farm,
felt his mind too good for that. He slept
one night in the warehouse and decided she was right, he’d try graduate
school for a year.
In April 1962 his father called one night while he
was correcting papers. "Don't be alarmed, but
Mother may be dying.”
I tried to go back the to the papers I was
reading, but couldn't make myself stay with them.
Instead, I took a piece of lined paper and
began writing (even using the red pencil that made all
those markings on the papers):
You're just
joking, I told her,
No human bones,
these that stick
Like talons
grasping at my sympathy.
Whether Marden would have written then revised “Late
on Mother’s Day,” if Bessie hadn’t prodded
him back to school years earlier I don’t know, but that prodding points
to another difference between
Odysseus’s epic quest and Marden’s pilgrimage. Bessie was no Penelope
patiently weaving by day and
unweaving by night to fend off impatient suitors, and Marden’s quest
was not to return to her. They set out
together.
When Bessie finished her degree in the late ‘60s
(all the kids in school by then) and earned a Master’s
in the early 70s she didn’t study writing or literature. She told me
once that faculty wives of her generation
didn’t study the subjects their husbands taught, fearing if they did
poorly it would reflect poorly on their
husbands, and if well, ‘Well, Marden helped her.’”
So she never had the formal training in writing and
literature Marden or his students had. But she never
lost the desire to write, and has started publishing. He helped her
tighten up “Mother Earth’s Tears,” a little.
One of the last poems he worked on. It appeared in Irreantum for Summer
2003.
Mother Earth’s Tears
Tears, Mother Earth’s
Gullies down her belly
She tries to repair herself
From forest fires, acid rain
She cannot endure forever
Toxic chemicals
Searing bombs
Rip her bowels
Spew her guts
She is dying
With puffs of smoke
Tremors in her bosom
Belching volcanos
She cannot endure
Mother Earth is angry
Yea, furious
Spewing molten lava
Opening cracks and swallowing us
Her tears drown towns
In merciless rain
She is devastating her children
Before they destroy her
--Bessie Soderborg Clark
Marden liked the way the line “She cannot endure
forever” comments on the stanza before, and
introduces the next stanza, which starts like a list of what she cannot
endure and becomes a sentence about why
she cannot endure forever.
Bessie has other writing to weave, and I hope she
doesn’t finish it any too soon.
Marden finished a poem of his own a few months
before his death, “You Damn Dog.” He had started
it about three years earlier, remembering a family gathering with three
of Bessie’s brothers, who had suffered
strokes and other indignities, arranged conversationally in their
wheelchairs.
The dog just kept barking
while you three sat silent
facing each other, none of you
quite mobile in limb
or mouth.
The conversational arrangement of wheelchairs,
mirroring everyone else’s conversation, struck Marden
as funny, especially when the fine diorama broke into speech:
A fine diorama, Alvin, out of which
you suddenly erupt:
“Shut up, you damn dog!”
He had told Agda the story and she said, and I can
hear a frosty note in her voice, “I don’t find that
funny at all.” He told me he couldn’t get the poem right and wouldn’t
finish it. But in February or March 2003
I found it finished on his computer, the file dated February 7, 2003,
and suggested minor changes.
You Damn Dog!
The dog just kept barking
while you three sat silent
facing each other, none of you
quite mobile in limb
or mouth. Most of the family
there: brothers, sister and spouses,
children, grand-children, all
gathered around the back-yard
barbecue pit you built years before
in love, Lloyd.
Still the barking, still you three
mute, the rest of us talking
small talk of family and love.
A fine diorama, Alvin, out of which
you suddenly erupt,
jump up,
fist raised like Liberty’s torch:
“Shut up, you damn dog!”
I tell the story hoping for laughs,
but mute listeners see no humor--
only pathos. And worse:
stony disapproval
at my attempt to make a joke.
I still laugh
I wish I had been the one to break
the spell:
“Shut up, you damn dog!”
--Marden J. Clark
If the Clark humor is a little odd manner of death
is outright ironic. Right at the height of the lunar
eclipse as half the kids was driving down State St. and I-15 to the
hospital. Dennis’s wife, Valerie, said it was
unfortunate there were poets in the family who would find that image,
and the comparison to Sam Clemens
leaving with Halley’s Comet, irresistible.
But there is a different image for me. He was sick
for a week, got sick when Bessie got a bad foot pain,
infected, and ended up on the floor. He couldn’t pick her up,
tried dragging her across the floor on a rug to the
bathroom. Called for help. “When I saw that woman on the floor . . .”
he told Donna and me on the way home
from the hospital.
We heard a lot at the memorial about Marden’s
compassion. So it seems deeply fitting that the pain
he developed after we got home, which we thought a stress reaction
(doctors too) was an obstructed bowel,
swallowed in a hernia. I had asked him once why the scriptures talk
about letting your bowels be full of
compassion, and he said that anciently the bowels were thought to be
the seat of compassion, like the heart is
now.
The what-if game is tempting to play. What if we had
known sooner? But we didn’t. Krista told me
he was talking to his brothers in law in the doctor’s office a few days
before he died. “What are they saying?”
“You damn dog,” he said, commonsensically. Smiling.
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