Tag: Clint Margrave

Two Poems by Clint Margrave

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Heart Failure

Tonight in bed
reading a book of Williams Matthews’s poems
and noticing
the short dates of his life
only 55,
not much older
than I am now.

Maybe poets have weaker hearts
than other people.

Larry Levis
Allen Ginsberg
Robert Lowell
Emily Dickinson

And even when
it isn’t heart failure
it’s usually some other attack on the heart,
failed love, disappointment, depression

Berryman, Plath, Crane

Weldon Kees disappearing
by the Golden Gate Bridge,
that foggy day in San Francisco,
the keys still in his car’s ignition.

Maybe heart failure is too perfect a metaphor
since every poet knows
the importance of a good end.

Maxine Kumin says
you should think of it
like closing a door

that it might
involve stepping away from your subject.

She was the last person to see
Anne Sexton alive.

*

My Neighborhood Little Free Library

I find a copy of Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires
in the stacks
among the worn romance novels
and self-help titles,
and wonder who would leave it.

Inside, a reminder card
for a past due doctor’s appointment
stuck between pages,
next to the lines,

“Love is not/ enough. We die and are put in earth forever/
We should insist while there is still time”

Take a book or leave a book,
the sign says.

I take it.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including Lying Bastard, Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and most recently, Visitor. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, The Moth, Ambit, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

Three Poems by Clint Margrave

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My Colleague Dies during Covid

The email says that they don’t have
any other contact information for her,
that there won’t be a funeral,
that there’s no address to send flowers.

“I wonder if anyone has a photo to help
us put a face with the name,” somebody
writes in the thread.

But what is a face in an age of masks?
What is a name?

*

A Poem Is a Grave

marked by words.

You have to dig deep
to find its bones.

You have to bury
yourself in it.

*

Destroy Unread

I heard that the famous novelist
wrote this on one of his notebooks
before he died.

I guess it’s only natural
to want to sanction the narrative of your life
after you’ve gone,
especially if you’re a writer.

When my father died,
he left no instructions
for a literary executor,
much less for a grieving son.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of the novel Lying Bastard (Run Amok Books, 2020), and the poetry collections, Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor (Forthcoming) all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, and The Moth, among others.

One Poem by Clint Margrave

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Egon Schiele: “A Trieste Fishing Boat” (1907)

There is no one fishing
in Trieste today.

They’ve been ordered to stay home.
The boat abandoned.

The world abandoned too
beyond the painter’s old frame.

The water is a murky pink,
a toxic dump,
reflecting off
a sky full of ash
or dust.

The boat sinks.

The colors leak
black as oil,

down into a
slick shadow,

down
into the dates of
my 2020 wall calendar.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of the novel Lying Bastard (Run Amok Books, 2020), and the poetry collections, Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor (Forthcoming) all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, and The Moth, among others.