Joy Clark

It was curious the way the children mobbed me.
And the way an adult, walking just ahead,
her son in hand, ignored their raised voices.
I’ve always been curious, wondered, about it all.
America had pressured Britain in some way.
Our submarines were like monsters in the sea lochs.
And now a new missile might draw down fire
from Russia, and there was no one to indict,
except the tubby American boy, the parson’s son,
living here with his family for some reason,
hurrying to his piano lesson, with half a crown for his teacher. 
Her name was Joy Clark, a name to conjure with
in 1960, on the Firth of Forth,
in slate-gray, factory-thronged Kirkcaldy,
happiness linked to station, a clerk’s elevation.

Joy Clark.  No taller than I was at 8,
she looked me in the eye when I sat down
before the keys, her cardigan warm and smooth
to hand and eye, over the curve of her spine.
Forty years later, to hear her called, “a poor wee cripple”
startled me, to remember the eyes, the smile,
the willow ware blue eyes of an imported tea cup
and a smile as white and brittle as a cloud,
a cloud without rain which might still surprise you
with a sheet of showers mudding up the garden.

I wept to Joy Clark, after the angry crowd,
boys and girls I didn’t know, who shouted, “Write
your grannies and your aunties! Write your granddads!
Tell them we don’t want--” What didn’t they want?--
“Don’t want your Skybolt!  Your fooking Skybolt!”
I wept to Joy a scale of ignorant self-pity,
and heard, from a face level with my own,
“America is a very demanding friend.  You must
ask your Mum and Dad.  Let’s hear your scales.”
A poor wee cripple.  Not how I remember her.
I think she was well off, living with
Big Netty, whose hats were famously big, although
her name was meant to remind us Joy was small.
Big Netty appeared at the end of every lesson
bare-headed, with a tray of tea and biscuits.  And this time,
seeing me weep, said, “Och!  The bubbling baby!”

20 years later, Joy and Netty stood with all
who cared to attend on a frigid Palm Sunday,
smiling at my return, Netty under a wheel of felt,
and Joy grinning her name, with half a dozen devout,
braving the cold sanctuary and my camera.
Let pass another 20 and they were all gone,
but one, the last of them to remember, fading herself,
saying, when I asked about Joy, “She’s been gone
these many years.  A poor wee cripple, you know.”
I didn’t know. I see her looking me in the eye--age in 1960?
Forty years old, unmarried, attached to a woman
who wore enormous hats and loved their life,
in a fireplace-heated music room with a coin
placed in her hand, waiting for me to start,
and waiting for what will follow this interlude,
the interval of pleasure after the lesson.

     First published in Iron Horse Literary Review, NaPoMo Issue, 2008

 

Brightlingen

At family church camp he fretted at his group meetings.
The mountain air, that light, dry, California brew,
was buoyant as froth or the rattlesnake’s footless tread.
And yet in this bathing and basking atmosphere,
he put his head in his hands before his fellows
and worried, worried at how he made a living.
He made his money, fed his family, paid his mortgage,
and, still a young man, would send his children to college
because he could imagine remarkable systems,
highly efficient, intercontinental systems,
to deliver death to families like his and ours.
We children heard about him or overheard
our parents chatting at bedtime about his trouble
and other trouble.  We were surrounded by trouble,
there in the sunny, shady, breezy mountains,
themselves a system of pines and underbrush
and creeks too shallow to drink from, all whispering,
all of it so good it hardly seemed possible
that among us there was one who designed systems,
miraculous systems that could demolish us.
And there were also those who feared their families,
though on vacation, feared them and wanted to flee,
and confessed as much at their group meetings, too.
We prayed in the dark.  Our parents did not design systems
or admit that they feared us, not as far as we knew.
And the pines surrounded our cabin and stood at our windows
all night long and were there in the morning, too.

    First published in Great River Review, Spring/Summer 2009