Press 1



Poetry by
Clare L. Martin

Out of Reach by Mario Sánchez Nevado
Out of Reach by Mario Sánchez Nevado


Memento Mori


A man walks across water
on stones; notices a crow 
sinking in the blue sky.

He steps onto earth,
leaning momentarily
against a cedar sapling. 
Pines etch and sway.
The creek laughs. The man thinks
of endings and beginnings:
his youngest daughter’s
daisy-eyes.

He slips his hand into his pocket,
fingering the dry skull
of a hummingbird. And it is cold
spring again: the iridescent,
bejeweled hummingbird
is caught in a spider’s web.

The spider silk enwrapping
the tiny bird holds bones together.
He picks at the feathers
sodden with rot.

He opens like a fan
the thin-as-paper wings.
Bones disarrayed, drift
to the ground in silence.




Tattoo


She has a tattoo
on her hip of a painted
Chinese horse—the brushstroke
animal grazes at her waist.

Black ink struggles
as if locked
in wind. In muscular
unison the horse
strides to her belly:
           a field of moons.




“Memento Mori”:
This is a poem that came out in a fury. The image of a hummingbird trapped in a spider’s web is one that has lingered with me for some time.  I read of it in an online birding group’s emails—a birdwatcher in the group had actually spied such a thing.   

“Tattoo”:
I was sitting in a café sipping an espresso and saw a young woman wearing a low-waist skirt and a top that exposed her midriff who had the tattoo described in the poem. I immediately fell in love with the images.  I don’t have any tattoos but I have imagined them on my body—specifically horses which are totem animals for me.  I couldn’t help but check her out because she was standing right in front of me and as I was sitting—her beautiful (exposed) tattoo was eye-level. So I wrote a poem.