From Homestead to a City
— for Hollis, Oklahoma
1.
History took in what the Hollis family made of their area:
how to hold a prairie is to establish ways to call home
the elements that nourish us; how to hope is to drive
fangs through Novembers severe with ice-glassed hunger,
raging into sleet a soft fire in the skin.
This is a town named for who found in the vision of a wagon
twelve days on the cue to begin assembling a belonging,
as a family on the move is an embryo desiring shape.
What miles form the site of such a home, and do they
dissipate, or do they work themselves into the pile of city.
2.
With the sheen of familial love, a kind of mother-
land begins to guard over the herd we eventually
form, as a word reinvented for this use is added
to the way we see ourselves. The father is a map
to show control, to show at last this city is our life
as a frame. Feed the fourteen-by-fourteen half-dugout
our meals so we cook in a shelter what we one day
might leave, for whatever covers us as we grow
is a friend to care for and forget from.
3.
Just what is the boundary that home takes.
Is it swept across the prairie, expanding
with increase, turning back with loss,
never a rested fullness. Is it creaking
when we step over the ring of its comfort,
loud enough to know its beat unmerciful
as we survive outside of it for years.
Remember to feel for live roots, to see
who is still familiar. Return over a severed
frame can be difficult to reach.
4.
It takes need to master the inevitable loss of the father,
a thick need for life, the froth of it that draws us forward.
George Hollis fed the plain a general store as a seed,
watched the growth of settlers, and trusted his flourish
into the richness of the soil, before fate decided he’d
abandon Hollis as a thing developed without him.
Arriving not yet dressed is a city that orders a father
into a place to have birthday parties lazy in the yard,
the way we have made our homes out of having to
keep building to stay ahead of the past.
We exchange what falls for a reason to rise, with Hollis
a son knocking a rhythm of hammers to the cut of the wood.
5.
The creation of the town reveals itself
on the surface of a shoebox lid lost
in the jump of a place only starting
to find a way forward. This is a sketch
that we come from, a material line of proof
to verify it took a swerve of quiet hands
catching traces of available area
for their house-driven markings.
Though lost, this is a lid constructed
for the filling-in of a box. It has held
a lot of life, even if we are unable to find it.
6.
The town is in tether the way a family is a kind of holding,
the way grass blades touch under a field, dreaming in the light
that sets a motion to each. We keep each other, Hollis as a reach
of arms, as a breath we hover shared above what we daily call home.
.
Pioneers Searched for Water
To comb in need for a fluid
ingredient of our body,
you reach nails into
the sand of a creek bed,
master a science of thirst,
of failure to know
what to feel for. Adrift,
there is no tap to turn
in the early dawn of waking.
There is no mist but the shower
of dust uncanny in the winds
of a noon quickly disappeared
into red shade. Among the debts
is a simple lick of water.
A miraculous wetness in wires
upon a friendlier-faced map
is a sure flow that stains a mind
full caught for miles in the sun.
The yell of the siteness of water
bid ritualized methods of living,
of waiting on dark clouds to end
these years of crippling drought
that dig into us and carry
earth into full fields of sky. Yet
these are ways home is steadied,
found as seconds retraced in memory,
quiet now, images at most, even
nostalgia-laced. This is the work
white with dust that somehow
houses us in generosity.
.
Ryan Clark is a documentary poet who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies, 2021) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press, 2019), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Yemasse, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Interim. Though originally from the part of southwestern Oklahoma that was once Greer County, Texas, he now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 