The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

  Llyn Clague's  poems have been published widely, including in Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, The Avalon Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, Hiram Poetry Review, and other print and online magazines. His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in 2014. Visit www.llynclague.com.

Kayakers

A pair of kayakers, rhythmic and silent,

slide by, graceful and smooth as ducks

directly below my perch on a bench

on a boulder at the edge of the lake.

In irregular arcs and eights

the birds glide, go suddenly topsy-

turvy; with small splashes pop

up, smugly smacking their lips.

High on the upstroke, paddle tips

shoot sparks, drip last tears

back into mother lake; drop and slip

under, propelling their riders.

In passing, the man and the woman,

raising fingertips high in the air,

give me companionable waves,

noiseless ripples in their wake.

The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com

Hunger In A New Yorker Poem

Visual, sensual, genteel,

the poem “Quahogs” in this upscale

mag jogs forward in a tide-steady

rhythm, measured, controlled,

describing clamming by the sea.

Auditory, olfactory, tactile,

in verbal as well as physical

markers, the verse progresses

from tidal flats to rake tines

to the character and color

of the shells: “Opal or pearl …,

their whorls and purple stains.”

Compact, concrete, picturesque:

it’s a best-of-friends evening

scene, with the “sky blazing,

its sinking orange fire.”

With even “the air in savor,”

delightful “precious butter”

drips on “the succulent

of the freezing dark sea.”

Sandily gritty, precisely

specific, grandiosely

the poem raises its sights

from one night’s appetite

for clams and friends by the sea

to the notion of a durable,

universal human hunger,

a “domain immeasurable.”

Delicately, tastily, prettily

worded, its private hankerings

lead to yearning for meaning,

universal, noble, eternal.

To the hunger, very measurable,

of people not clamming by the sea,

this verse avoids allusion,

artfully, assuredly, gently.

The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com

The Lined Pad

Stung again,

I sit with ancient envy

and a pad,

a pad lined like a keyboard,

the cold black-and-white instrument

my always older sister, as a child,

used so brilliantly to grab love –

a pad, whose slat-like rows,

blank with potential, stretch to the far edge,

and, from last night,

a memory that evokes, instead of envy

and its darker sisters fear and greed,

light –

a memory, after we both,

in our old age, confessed to depression,

blank with possibles and stretching out far, too far, out to the edge –

of her saying that,

however dark the despair,

by sitting at the piano and playing,

improvising, toying, almost doodling, she could lift

it;

however briefly.