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    Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars
    Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars
    Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars
    Ebook89 pages29 minutes

    Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars

    By Patricia Clark

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    About this ebook


    Patricia Clark's poems immerse the reader in the living world through the quality of her attention and appreciation. There's hard-won intelligence here. We see it in people sharing a meal and being especially kind to each other after a suicide: lots of please and thanks / as we handed food around / basket of steaming bread / for

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTerrapin Books
    Release dateOct 28, 2020
    ISBN9781947896284
    Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars
    Author

    Patricia Clark

    Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Sunday Rising, The Canopy, and most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate, among others. Awards include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She also received the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia for The Canopy. Patricia was professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, where she was the university's poet-in-residence. She was also poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007. Her poem “Astronomy 'In Perfect Silence’” was chosen to go to the moon on the NASA/Space X launch in November 2024 as part of the Lunar Codex.

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      Book preview

      Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars - Patricia Clark

      I

      Feasting, Then

      High in the canopy,

      feasting, then

      falling. A controlled

      drop in flight

      to a lower branch.

      I watched

      without understanding,

      with awe.

      I’ve been shut in

      those houses

      too or blind

      at work,

      not noticing.

      All the inattention

      when a miracle

      takes place nearby

      and could save us.

      Do I really mean

      save? You must

      believe me—the feasting

      on some tree fruit

      high up—and the

      bird?—I think

      either a flycatcher

      or a waxwing.

      Such moves, so much

      cascading, in

      confidence, such lifting

      of the beak to sing.

      Yes, I mean save.

      After the Suicides

      We had to go on without you, rise to work,

      open the checkbook and balance the funds,

      there was laundry to be bundled to the basement,

      shoved in the washer, someone forgetting just how

      terribly the spin cycle ends, how it leaves jeans sopping,

      though they eventually dried out to be hauled

      upstairs, and the living room collected dust

      on surfaces, dog hair stuck to the rug, clutter of books,

      and the kitchen, hearth of it all, hub of life, there

      spinach was old, florets of broccoli gone yellow,

      icemaker welded the ice into cubes-in-a-field,

      potatoes had eyes, fish past its prime,

      and yet out of what was edible, someone wrought

      a meal into shape, a simple pasta sauce,

      an invented bit with mushrooms, onion,

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