ADAM CLAY
ORIGIN STORY
The cat on the back steps
sleeps through death,
sap seeping up through the pine
woodgrain appearing a little more
each day. Everywhere I look
I see a thousand lines striking
out to nowhere. This one towards
the alley, another stretching
to the room where I was born
two blocks from here. Does
this plot of land mean coming
full circle? I grab a book from
the shelf, and its scent takes me
back to Brooklyn in the early
aughts. When memory goes
will I know it? How brilliant
my friends, both living
and dead, continue to be.
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*** ** ***
THE PASSING LANDSCAPES OF YOUTH
As a child, the dull thud
of an hour in church felt
like several lifetimes.
So too, a bus ride
to school. The month of
May. The state of living
proceeds like perpetual
forgiveness. Once a crucified
Jesus writhed on a cross
during the service,
behind the pastor,
and it all felt normal
from the place I’d
been and where I thought
I was going.
One day the figures in
the stained-glass window
stepped right out
of their silence
and stepped back into
the frames, the panes
cleaner and more
transparent than they
had ever been before
or would ever be again.
As a child, I became
a connoisseur of light sitting
in the straight-backed pew.
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*** ** ***
THE END OF DREAMING
The daydreams don’t arrive later in life
like they did before, as if the mind
has other things to do and it does,
but where’s the wind off the water
and the water off the trees? I close
the laptop and look to the window
like a screen containing a static
world. A bird too distant to name
overhead. The clouds like a borderland
daring the eye to pass through them,
but what if the borderlands are not
that far from here? I push each word
around like a block of ice and can only
guess the shape of the melting water.
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*** ** ***
HUMANITY
Clarity like a storm buckling
beneath the eye, I find
momentary quiet
in the loudest parts
of the day. On the beach,
some bird walks
through the scene looking
sick, and the children chase
it off, their parents off
in the shade laughing
at their cruelty. I take
a photo of the bird
to identify later
on an app. The moon falls
out of the sky like a coin,
and the app tells me nothing,
the bird too backlit by the sun.
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*** ** ***
CELEBRATION
A fiftieth birthday party on the patio
while the band played Hello in There,
a song maybe they didn’t think too much
about. It rained for a while and then
it didn’t. Did the sky look blameless?
A barstool by the street. A flatscreen
TV, too. A yard with a hundred broken
lawnmowers arranged just so. I doubt
there’s much sense in saying everything
out loud, but some people do it anyway.
Thank god no one’s ever listening.
The moral high ground, it turns out,
might be actually the low road. I try
to poach an egg a dozen times,
and every time I fail in a new way
miraculously.
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*** ** ***
AND ALSO TO YOU
Probably too defensive
for my liking, I argued
with myself in a dream.
Sainthood’s a bad look on everyone,
which in the dream I knew,
but the mirror
confirmed all stray thoughts.
I should say, though, a defensive
posture is a bad look on everyone except
for the portraits by the masters.
In them, the blood is always
unbelievably red in the best way
possible, some coincidence
shared with surprise, though no one
feigns disbelief. Maybe
the light feels orphaned today,
or maybe it’s the shade of blue
as we shift toward a new balm
for the body. The clouds hang
clinically in the air,
and I shoot imaginary arrows
straight through each one.
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*** ** ***
RIGHT SIDE OF THE GRASS
The sound of the buzzard flapping
the day to life might as well
have been in your head. Each
morning is beautiful in some
backward way, like how
a memory retold becomes a touch
different each time. A good
morning is this one, a touch
less golden than the day before,
and if you look far enough back,
you’ve lost thousands of them,
though the grace of the mind
moves forward, always forward
for fear of what going back
will look like, knowing now what
fragility will always leave undone.
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ADAM CLAY
Adam Clay’s latest book is CIRCLE BACK (Milkweed Editions, 2024). He teaches at Louisiana State University.
To download a printable PDF version of this page, click here.
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A Dozen Nothing 