Patricia Clark

Twyckenham Notes
Issue Sixteen
Summer 2023

Two Twomblys: Quatro Stagioni

             1. Autunno – the landscape shot

                          with ripeness, berry juice

             digested by birds, shat

                                       on our garden path, or:


boys throwing handfuls of pokeweed berries

                                       at a white wall

             where stalks of teasel,

                                       or goldenrod, climb.


That’s an umbel right where the A

                          for autunno begins.

             Why do I only have two seasons—

                                       the other two gone?


             2. Inverno

Sharper, this one, along the straightness

                          of an icicle, frozen white

             transparent hangings from roofline

                                                    or the branch.


Gold and green bringing me to spruce and pine,

                                       also hemlock, ash.

             Ash trees in our town slashed down

                                                    after emerald ash borers came—

accidental imports on shipboard wooden pallets

                          then escaped to wreak

             their harm—chewing up trees. Snow

                                       bending branch tips down—


fallen in a mound, transformed to ice.

PATRICIA CLARK is the author of Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, her sixth book of poems, and three chapbooks. She recently retired from thirty years of teaching in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University in Michigan where she was also the university’s poet in residence. She has new work forthcoming in Plume, The Southern Review, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “Astronomy: ‘In Perfect Silence’” was chosen to go to the moon in November 2024 as part of the Lunar Codex.

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