THESE UNPROMISING THINGS

These Unpromising Things

Has anyone noticed lately the trouble with soon?

How soon shows up late, if soon even bothers?

Soon sets the alarm, but it’s too late.

Soon makes promises that not even soon can keep.

Lately, sooner looks a lot like later.

We check the clock on the wall, drum our fingers,

go to the window to look for soon at the corner,

soon driving down the street to our house,

to our garden party, to our ache and pain,

but the street is empty and quiet as Sunday morning.

I know a man who cries for soon like an unrequited lover,

who pines and refuses to eat, who lets the yard go

and the Times to collect in a soggy mess on the porch.

He hasn’t thought of anything but soon for weeks.

Soon, he says, where are you? But soon never answers.

I know just how that man feels.

I used to be like him, hoping that soon would come —

as opportunity, as fate, as justice, as salvation or peace,

or in the familiar guise of the nick of time.

Soon, I said, how soon?

But soon never answers, which is as it should be,

I suppose, for soon is not now. Soon is not. Soon is never.

Soon is what I have had to learn: light from a dead star,

as in, soon my luck will change. It’s got to.

Otherwise, what’s the point? By then it has.

In Emily Dickinson’s Closet

Prototypes of all kinds for an America

never to be fully explicated: em-dash as thoughtline,

the odd comma placement for what goes on

inside a boiling consciousness while the quills hover,

so many of them over so many pieces of paper,

scrap to repurposed to fresh — and dear — for only

the best draft in the carefulest hand.

Em, you can be sure, of a ponder

and the inevitable dive back into language.

The hymnal sits idle until called upon,

book of spiritual claims to test and apply

to this sequestered life of making,

every signature littered at the hinge,

crumby, grease-stained, pieces of idea left behind.

Is this what it means, the fixedness?

Lifted quill or blinking cursor, a motherlode of Curse.

Imagine the obsession, the loneliness of it!

There must be a streaky window, to be sure,

a prospect of denuded woods for it to mean much,

and streams too to give depth, a desk with drawers

stuffed with insistence and hoarded ambition,

the finished work on the very best rag.

What is a poet but a grand pact with the Unknowable?

Engine of figure, wave, cycle, trope and — stab —

the Fortress Noun, the Muscled Verb, the diving.

Notes on Two Cardinals

December, January, February, March

withhold and they are dull —

but then

offering through the kitchen window:

— a bright soldier, one drab —

a duet of drive and discipline

weaving a nest inside a camellia.

All those months

living cold in the cold core of the soul,

heart’s hands pocketed for warmth

even April couldn’t give when it arrived.

Some hurts you just never know

in the moment.

And then one morning one

of May’s standard redemptions . . .

you know.

So a bird to thank. Two.

Clark Watson is a poet, song writer and musician living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His book of street songs and poems, The Shepherd’s Calendar, was privately published in 2022. The Weather in Bluffton, Ind., his book of prose poems and lyric fictions, was published by Slender Book Press in 2024. His CD of spoken word and jazz-infused classic poetry and music was released in 2021 with the band Program for Jazz. 50 Sent Songs, a year-long poetry & songs project is available at https://ytlb.bandcamp.com/. All titles available at http://www.clarkwatson.com.