Clayfeld Holds On

By Robert Pack

from “Clayfeld’s Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack”
 
            Beneath this mellow harvest moon,
I can still picture you—a boy content
just fishing with his father from a ledge
above a foaming stream. The flailing trout
you caught is packed in gleaming ice;
the pink stripe all along its side
is smeared across black shiny dots
that seem to shine with their own light.
            I’m sure that you can picture me
with equal vividness, and though we’re not
identical, there is a sense
in which I am inventing you
as much as you’re inventing me.
 
In Clayfeld Holds On, Robert Pack offers his readers a comprehensive portrait of his longtime protagonist Clayfeld, who is also Pack’s doppelgänger, his alternate self, enacting both the life that the poet has lived and the life he might have lived, given his proclivities and appetites. Poet and protagonist, taken together, are self and consciousness of self, the historical self and the embellished story of that literal self.
            Written with a masterly ear for rhythm, and interweaving narrative and lyrical passages, the poems recount Clayfeld’s formative memories while exploring concepts such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, as well as cosmic phenomena such as the big bang theory and black holes. Through all of this, Pack attempts to find purpose and meaning in an indifferent universe, and to explore the labyrinth of his own proliferating identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226303567

Robert Pack

Robert Pack was born in New York in 1929. He taught at Middlebury College and for more than twenty years he served as Director of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. After retirement he taught in the University of Montana’s Honors College. During his career Pack published twenty-one collections of poetry and three book-length studies of poets. He died in June, 2023.

Book preview

Clayfeld Holds On

Selected Books by Robert Pack

POETRY

To Love That Well (2013)

Laughter Before Sleep (2011)

Still Here, Still Now (2008)

Composing Voices (2005)

Elk in Winter (2004)

Rounding It Out (1999)

Minding the Sun (1996)

Fathering the Map (1993)

Before It Vanishes (1989)

Clayfeld Rejoices, Clayfeld Laments (1987)

Inheritance (1986)

Faces in a Single Tree (1984)

Waking to My Name (1980)

Keeping Watch (1976)

Nothing but Light (1972)

Home from the Cemetery (1969)

Guarded by Women (1963)

A Stranger’s Privilege (1959)

The Irony of Joy (1955)

LITERARY CRITICISM

Willing to Choose: Volition & Storytelling in Shakespeare’s Major Plays (2007)

Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost (2003)

The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft (1991)

Affirming Limits: Essays on Morality, Choice, and Poetic Form (1985)

Wallace Stevens: An Approach to His Poetry and Thought (1959)

Clayfeld Holds On

ROBERT PACK

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

ROBERT PACK is the Abernethy Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Emeritus at Middlebury College and Distinguished Senior Professor Emeritus of Humanities in the Honors College of the University of Montana, Missoula. He is the author of five prose works and nineteen previous books of poems, most recently Laughter before Sleep, also available from the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30342-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30356-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226303567.001.0001

The author and the University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Helene and Richard Rubin—Pearl Robinson Foundation toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pack, Robert, 1929– author.

Clayfeld holds on / Robert Pack.

pages ; cm

Poems.

ISBN 978-0-226-30356-7 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-226-30342-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

i. Title.

ps3566.a28c536 2015

811'.6 — dc23

2015010510

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Bob Pack’s lnvocation to Clayfeld

Clayfeld’s Encounter by the Sea

Clayfeld Encompasses a Paradox

Clayfeld Beholds a Miracle

Clayfeld Attends a Seder

Clayfeld Admonishes the Bard

Clayfeld Defines Sublimity

Clayfeld Goes Birding

A Blue Heron Appears to Clayfeld

Clayfeld’s Kidney

Clayfeld Observes a Herd of Elk

Clayfeld Organizes His Jokes

Confronting Clayfeld

Clayfeld among the Fireflies

Clayfeld Takes Flight

Clayfeld Listens to the Aspens

Paean for a Turtle

Clayfeld Encircled

Clayfeld Unresolved

Clayfeld’s Vampire Fantasy

Clayfeld on Jury Duty

Clayfeld Throws His Hat into the Ring

Clayfeld’s Reversal

Clayfeld Reading by the Fire

Clayfeld Grieves for Annie

Clayfeld’s Inheritance

Clayfeld Addresses His Father

Drifting and Gliding

Clayfeld’s Interpretation

Clayfeld Thinks about Women

Clayfeld’s Pride

Clayfeld Bedeviled

Clayfeld’s Cogito

Clayfeld’s Inspiration

Clayfeld Contends with Entropy

Star-Crossed Clayfeld

Clayfeld in the Rain

Clayfeld’s Injury

Humming in the Air

Clayfeld Embellishes a Willow Tree

Clayfeld’s Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack

Epilogue: Swan River in October

Epilogue: Abundance

Clayfeld Holds On

Bob Pack’s Invocation to Clayfeld

By listening to what you say about

ephemerality and love,

I memorize your memories of what

in fact occurred, but also I’m enhanced

by your far-ranging fantasies, which have

a substance of their own and thus

possess the power to affect my life.

The pleasure that you take adds to my own

when you evoke the twistings of desire,

a sheep clothed in the body of a wolf,

through innuendoes and equivocations,

not to be evasive, only to be

accurate about uncertainty

of motivation and intent—

as when a photon beam is flashed

through two small slits in an obstructing wall

behind which a reflecting screen displays

what the experimenter sees: the pattern

of a wave or else a particle,

with double meanings like a pun.

Might not that unpredictability

apply to you and me—each one of us

the other’s plausible alternative,

although each double thought remains

a rumination of my own?

The waterfall you hiked to in your youth

exists without someone’s observing it,

but the pale girl who walked with you

through brambles up the mountainside,

who shared your rapture as the spume

composed a rainbow of its own, she might

be a composite of some other girls

you loved—or maybe you invented her

out of a wish, a dream, a reverie.

I need your fantasies so I

can witness my own life as if

it were a story in a gilded book,

replete with sorrows, disappointments,

foolishness, but still a comedy

affirming laughter aged perspective brings

of how lust lights the way to love.

Ah! love, redeeming love, although

at bottom bodily, first sexual,

yet reaching out to humankind—

such love sought always to emerge in you

as if Be fruitful, multiply!

was a commandment to conceive

your self-proliferating self anew.

Clayfeld, my doppelgänger, as I’m yours—

quadruple if you count the two of us

as one—go forth with widened eyes

among proliferating bear grass like

a constellation in the spangled woods,

and journey where your heart revives

the need to reinvent yourself.

The waterfall, composed of molecules,

quarks indivisible, is also

an epiphany incarnate

in the airy ambience of words evoking

your own covenant with Nature,

represented as a girl reposing on

a lichen-softened ledge, her forehead gleaming

with the waterfall’s transparent spray—

a girl whose name you might remember

and hold dear. Perhaps you can recall

the shimmer of her hair, her heated cheeks,

the leaf-entangled light that glistened

on her shoulders as you kissed her

and, without constraint, she put her arms around

your neck, returning your uncertain kiss.

And so your memory, though improvised,

completes what might have been, and so

the past can be doubly restored

by apprehending my own finite self,

aware of its own finitude,