Poetry of Jeff Clark > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Jeff Clark

Jeff Clark was born in southern California in 1971. He went to Iowa for poetry, then moved to San Francisco and Oakland. Clark currently does book design as Quemadura, after eleven years with Oakland design studio Wilsted & Taylor. His own books are The Little Door Slides Back (Sun and Moon, 1997; reprint FSG, 2004), Music and Suicide (FSG, 2004), and 2A (Quemadura, 2006), written in collaboration with Geoffrey G. O'Brien. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his partner, the poet Christine Hume, and their daughter, Juna Hume Clark.

Decomposition

Jeff Clark

Something in the force of my address
made you restless
I wrote it down and you wrote back
Something near the middle
of that writing felt like fire
but why not abundant warmth
Let me look at the end, at an enemy again
Somewhere in the flesh of my head
was a desire for my death
Death you said is a rhyme for my name
A rhyme made almost real
by what I've heard you've said
Words for others—not mine for us
or yours—can be murderous
In the poem you arrange them well
But what's to be done about untrue lines
is to let them lie

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