Devil Looks at a Thistle by Charlie Clark

It took four decades and a spring of extravagant dithering to produce thistle blooms that shine

white as fresh bedsheets when the moonlight is thick enough to grace them, when the clouds

in their string timidity seem akin to the breath that either refuses to register its complaints

or has forgotten how daylight renders everything more particular, thus less lavishly spectral,

even scorn’s certainty, which here among the thistles seems closer to the parable of the one brother

who refused to mourn the other because he had been told that any show of emotion was a path

he couldn’t track his way back to the start of, that once begun he could never proceed

in a new direction, so over time became a single round stone on which the living still stub their toes.

Maybe it wasn’t what the parable intended, but it made a certain deadness seem viable

as a philosophy, or at least what in the dark, in dark conversation, can pass for a philosophy,

the way one can look at a plant for forty years and only think it a nasty thing, can like the celery-crisp

rip its base makes as you snap it, can feel against your fingers its thorny stalk, its little offering

of pale blood. You can touch one wet finger to the other, can smell its slick nothing and know

what you’ve done is meaningless but that it doesn’t make having done it any less wrong.

Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. His book, The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin, will be published by Four Way Books in fall 2020. He lives in Austin, Texas.