3 poems by Patricia Clark
 

1 essay by Cela Xie,
on the poems of Patricia Clark

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 Essay for “Terroir,” “Bull in a Field” and “Old Bees”

The title “Terroir” reminds me of “Terror,” and that seems echoed by the violence of the first stanza. The number five seems to be of significance beyond mere detail; 5 is red to me, with a brassy clamor, and that is connected to the gash in the tree. I really love “I liken it to an amphora,” especially coming as a short sentence after that three-stanza sentence. How is a pine tree like an amphora? Before you explain in the next stanza, I think of the shape, which isn’t really analogous to the straightness of a trunk.

Going on, we have a fantastic transition into human characters, badly needed for life and contrast against the woody environment. What a fantastic pair of lines: “Because I thought / I was meant to be childless” is — “childless” seems poetic to me in itself, the softness of the affricate followed by the ending sibilant. The ending of the poem is mysterious, and it contains a “you” who I assume is the “I” who leaves the house for good. I imagine a face pressed against the cut-out hearts in a slatted chair, as if a child slumped over, pressing their head against the chair in a sulky mood. The use of the word “you” also suggests that there was more than one child who left the house. “Terroir” can also refer to the circumstances that formed the speaker.

The title “Bull in a Field” seems to play off of “bull in a china shop” — free instead of confined, natural instead of destructive. Perhaps it was the name of the game the children played? The form reminds me of a zipper, two jagged halves juxtaposed, but the division isn’t even, left and right lines sometimes overlapping, creating an uncomfortable tension. “Where were we?” in the fifth stanza continues the pattern of the first line, and reveals a certain uncertainty not only with what was chasing the speaker and his sibling(s), but what they were chasing as well.

The mention of what “a girl should stay away from” vs. the boys they encounter is interesting for what it suggests about the gender of the speaker’s group. The appearance of the “girl” vs. the “boys with BB guns” sets up a gendered opposition, victim vs. aggressors. The speaker says that they “never told any of it,” but fails to say who they hid this information from. Parents? The poem as a whole reminds me of one of those chase dreams you sometimes have, or I have at any rate, where something runs me down. There’s a desperation to it, but it’s also fun, like the game in this poem.

The title of the last poem is much more straightforward than the other two titles, simply stating the subject of the poem, and not presenting a new facet. “Blossom-riding” is such a beautiful phrase. It makes me think of the bees as cowboys. The lines “ moving stem, / petals closing / in as night chills” are particularly graceful; I think “stem” and “petal” are just beautiful words in themselves, like the things they describe. The poem ends in a way that could be warm or ominous, depending on how you look at it. It isn’t clear what the situation is exactly, or why the speaker has left. There’s a lot of beautiful flower imagery in this poem, which contrasts with the lonely theme. The long, thin shape also reminds me of a wooden post. It gives me a sense of peace with the idea of dying alone.