Holly Virginia Clark
Survival
Affirmation for the American Pessimist
Imagine
Thursday: a line
to
the Blue Note clots the sidewalk,
so
passersby amble along the curb,
as
traffic pulses inches from their toes.
Cabs
razor around the corner
without
pausing on red.
Imagine
the drivers, imagine all of us,
putting
our faith in the reel editors
splicing
together each crucial frame,
but
how often does one end up
on
the cutting room floor?
How
often is it the top stadium stair
and
we’re falling backwards?
It’s
not just that we don’t die:
it’s
that we think we won’t
and
we’re right. We keep waking up
and
falling asleep again. We keep
mounting
the stairs to Death’s sprawling attic,
glancing
at the stacked boxes of rue and reparations
we’ll
sort someday, then busting
straight
through the roof hatch.
Next
thing we know, we’re guzzling
tequila
on the roof of the house on Ravine Street.
We’re
hooting at the cracks
of
guns ricocheting around the dead-end
by
the river. We’re teetering barefoot
along
the gutter and peering downtown,
scoping
the skyline for hiccups of smoke
from
fires the looters started.
And
if someone was running,
shot
in the shoulder, we didn’t know it,
if
someone stumbled to the front
of
the long line to heaven, we
were
braiding each others’ hair,
writing
poems, getting married—
poor
Death doing pratfalls
to
the laughter of our living.
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Holly Virginia Clark earned her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007.
Her poetry was most recently anthologized in Poem, Revised, a publication of Marion Street Press.
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