Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006), and A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, which is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His chapbook In a World of Ideas, I Feel No Particular Loyalty is available from Cinematheque Press. He co-edits Typo Magazine and lives in Michigan.
And Snow Is What Snow Has Always Been
Of course a quilt is a house—
And of course you can become so enamored
with an image that you become it:
and like the snow
all over town you become it.
You have far-reaching talent for
mass appeal and for sending a few thousand birds
a few thousands miles south. And when it is March
you might even melt a bit but you are last
to tuck us in at night
and last to think a thought we wish we had:
what we croon is what we have a deed to, and the deed
is some thing we think we thought we always had.
Infinity and the Implications of the Word
Or a word. A word unused does not always turn archaic.
Amazed by the age of the airplane we were sitting on.
Amazed by the news to be found on a jukebox.
Amazed, but not yet placing things into category. No word
for a sparrow in the house, a sparrow
that chooses not to fly out of the open window
into the field that wraps around the curve of the world.
A moment to pause, a moment to waste, shooing
the bird out again, but no result, no word
for that kind of failure, no word for that kind of news.