Ryan Clinesmith
Three Poems
Meditation (On Bugs)
They get around, bugs,
dying all the time, upside down.
The worst is when they fly
right at eye level so
when walking down the stairs
one can see everything
only ground is meant to behold.
The worst are the ones that
get inside you like a bad idea.
Spreading and infiltrating deep
held beliefs that make me run
from a cough, or that make
a teacher shun a student.
Like the way a king is crowned
by taking our worst fears
and turning them upside down,
so that what should only be
dragged through dirt gets daylight.
Meditation (On the Garden)
None could walk along these hedges
and miss the smell of summertime
without wondering what’s behind
the design that keeps our one pledge
to smell the roses but hold time
in stasis like a preserved rind.
If profit could resolve the night,
would man miss the opening rose
or design that makes petals tight
like the single bud with many parts
cast off when I withdraw my nose
to claim pollen as my true heart.
Soon they’ll build a labyrinth of hedges
in the parks to keep us apart
when we realize we must go out,
and if I find myself alone
will I feel as though I’m outside
or will I need to scale green ledges?
When we are together, pollen
mills in noon air, the garden wakes
a treasure of jasmine, reddening
rings dimple and swell,
neighbors warn of neighbor’s traits,
“Be careful, someone’ll take those,
boy or rat, don’t leave ‘em!”
It just takes some time for growth,
like trees shed their leaves and yew
back into pasts, through youth
and long return, to grow too old.
Meditation (On Fear)
If the first full moon of quarantine hadn’t happened
just as grandma texted, “The cat’s strolled up
and down the street like a pack of middle schoolers,”
fearing the news tigers can get it too, I wouldn’t be thinking
of all the relevance in otherwise meaningless events;
the Tiger King, Joe Exotic, the old ladies outside
the nursing home holding back their cooped up Havanese,
an ouroboros muttering through masks.
The first full moon of quarantine like the crows
I’ve resorted to herding off the asphalt onto the sidewalk.
I’m struck by the families camped on their front lawns,
making up for lost time, making sure they’re ready
for the first full moon of the “apocalypse,” while crows scare
up into shadows over tents. I’m seeing fear
means nothing without all of this. If there was no love affair
with Cuomo, and Randy Rainbow, there would be no fear.
If we didn’t have anything to lose, would we fear anything?
Perhaps we would fear the loss of absence, which is odd.
I guess something meaningless can be unintentionally cruel,
like telling someone the udon noodles are in the freezer
when you’ve left them in aisle four, or how slowly, over time,
it becomes the running joke, the loss of food, or fear
of grocery stores. I do listen constantly to things
that have no meaning. Should I put on my mask
in the shower? Maybe I don’t need to
speak with grandma for the fourth time today,
and maybe instead I should sit and watch the neighbors’
white linens descend into smaller and smaller rectangles
on a clothesline with two red scarves at either end,
or maybe I should sit in the grass, turn away from the wind.
—Submitted on 06/02/2020
Ryan Clinesmith is the editor of The Poetry Distillery, as well as the poet and writer in residence at the Birch Wathen Lenox School in New York City. He graduated from Emerson College and is an MFA candidate at Hunter College. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Glint Literary Journal, First Literary Review-East, Gravel, The Merrimack Review, Blueline Literary Magazine, and other journals.
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