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Our Children Playing Catch in the Evening of No Warning

A nearness in the twilight, the lovely arc.
Cut grass not yet the scent of elegy.
Then the elegy. Then the years...
Now my four-year-old plying a small ball
across the floor at his nine-months sister,
my wife listening behind her book, the dusk
rolling over the houses, the fingers I
of my right hand unfurling to catch a ball
my father tosses a year before his death.
That old fact so dim today.

Such a thing to learn...
Not deliverance, nor elegy, always the white ball
in its sure circuit, the easy backward draw
of the glovehand. In the sky above my children,

I am playing ball, the warm crutches
leaning like a song in the dugout
as limp for the batter's box.
In the sky above my children, I limp
for the batter's box and watch a soft line drive
float safely above a glove.

And so the forgetting floats on the small charities
of applause, the pinchrunner's comic awe...
My daughter, my son elaborate in his coaching...

We can't hold all the facts for long.
I'm still surprised how we stopped playing that one night
when my father went inside astonished, hurt
—the ball I'd thrown—
the crisp delayed ache when it drilled his forearm,
his whispering how it actually hit him,
that this was not meant-to-be.
:
There are no signs. That's the problem.
As we stop to listen to the last few seconds of dusk
submerge beneath the evening of no warning,
it may strike us again, the breath
actually stricken from our lungs.

Then the nearness in the twilight.
Then the little ones in their time.

The Steeple

This tall woods with its summer-thick air
embraces the old church here at the lazy end of our street.
Sundays I watch the elderly Protestants, a few good
and troubled friends, smile and limp into the plain white
building with the green pentagonal steeple, their arms
clutching hello to each other, their almost forgotten sins
webbed like fine branches over the patch of sky.
The Taylors wave to me. On my porch across the cul-de-sac,
I read the sports page and book review and sip coffee,
pausing to muse on the occasional delirious cooing
of my four-year-old under the thistled berry bushes.
He believes in the unmediated earth before him,
the hidden, darker dirt he spoons down to,
the sow bug he touches softly into a ball,
the last secret unpicked blood-red prize
he saves off the vine. Yesterday,
my mother's letter in its frail restraint
implores me to give her grandson
the same Christian surety I'd had, the pure
saving friendship of Jesus Christ, that which
my father-dead twenty-five years-carried
in his heart and she always in hers. Some days
I too want to feel the Word in the wind,
touch the Lord's flesh in the dirt. But
as always, I have nothing more than either
wind or dirt-and the sweet, unmeaningful scent.


Unblemished beneath a sun hat, my wife
plants verbena along the driveway, her spade
uplifting the soil, her passion that these live blooms
paint the air all summer. Faintly Episcopal,
she finds my faithlessness an endearing wound.
The green blades, the blue petals, the willing loam,
form in her hands a shape, I think,
thing mystical, just her own plenary trust
that whatever's unseen deserves no worry.
Once dubious, I'm now thankful for her gardener's faith,
especially mornings such as this when I know
soon we have to prepare our son for the questions
without answer. His grandmother, old neighbors,
his friends, they all tell him of their mystic kingdom.
Irrepressible, their knife-sharp steeple peals
in the divided air its song of psalms and heaven,
its ascending unearthly idea. Before he is lifted
up from the vanishing soil into the airy edges
of their numerologies, before he loses
the first scent of vines and duff, my wife will sketch
in the prosaic dirt a picture of the moon
and the soft blades, the insects
and the ripe berries. Believing absolutely
in my love for both of them only, I'll listen
quietly in my chair, her lyric, unchanted words
breaking like revelations across his face.

KEVIN CLARK's poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Black Warrior Review, College English, The Georgia Review, and Keener Sounds: Selected Poems from The Georgia Review. He is a recipient of the Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review. The Academy of American Poets selected In the Evening of No Warning for a publisher's grant from the Greenwall Fund.  His critical articles have appeared in several journals and collections, among them The Iowa Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Clark teaches at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, where he lives with his wife and two children.

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