Stranger: Poems

By Adam Clay

“A heartbreakingly stunning collection dedicated to the unsung suspension of time that occurs when life suddenly goes awry.” —Ada Limón

Stranger is a book of both great change and deep roots, of the richest elements of the earth and the instability of a darkening sky. The third collection by Adam Clay dives into a dynamic world where the only map available is “not of the world / but of the path I took to arrive in this place, / a map with no real definable future purpose.” Tracing a period of great change in his life—a move, a new job, the birth of his first child—Clay navigates the world with elegance and wonder, staring into the heart of transition and finding in it the wisdom that “Despite our best efforts to will it shut, / the proof of the world’s existence / can best be seen in its insistence, / in its opening up.” By firmly grasping on to the present, the past and the future collapse into the lived moment, allowing for an unclouded view of a way forward.

“In language that is circular, stoic, and almost Zen-like, Clay attempts to remain himself in the face of life shifting underneath him.” —Publishers Weekly

“In those moments when one rearranges the furniture in a room or leaves the cast-iron skillet in the oven or contemplates an ink stain on the wall, Clay finds a space for deep inquiry.” —Kazim Ali

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781571319098

Adam Clay

Adam Clay is the author of five collections of poems: Circle Back, To Make Room for the Sea, Stranger, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, and The Wash. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission, he teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits Mississippi Review.

Book preview

ONE

To Take Note of Where We Are

Plainly spoken, I am responding to you.

Despite our best efforts to will it shut,

the proof of the world’s existence

can best be seen in its insistence,

in its opening up. Should we get lost,

let us be lost in a familiar space, surrounded

by every motion of the unnamed and unseen

until the moment they appear. With the sofa

in a slightly different place this morning,

the room resembles a dream of the room:

the details remain present and realistic

while everything bends toward one wall

in particular. I know what you want,

but the wind will not concern itself with us.

Northern Lights

Light or even a phrase or two

erased from the mind

like a once familiar street razed:

buildings destroyed, moved

elsewhere, tucked into the folds

of a tornado (you hope)—

One thinks many times not burdened by

but along with the clock—

Of course, it’s a pleasure to arrive most anywhere

these days filled with desire

but once the mind’s dwelling place becomes an ice cave

love defines its own tributaries with pine needles

or another way to say let’s only speak

in the absolutes of morning, free of comparison,

of a drifting scale tipped to an almost perfect balance:

none of that language needed now

between meals, between the future departing from disaster,

and once the mind slows to the point of regression,

then what to make of the first memory arrived upon or within

for you what would it be and know

you cannot know what it would be for others—

Even in their telling

there’s an orbit of masquerade around which no moon

could ever exist nor would it want to,

no perfect circle or symmetry to dwell within:

once the trees did not need their names and the night

needed no voice, it needed no knot

to unravel, it needed no one

to explain its madness to

Disruption Without Shrapnel

An admission of a river’s deviation from whatever path

aligned to the stars, you clip a word from the mind

until it forms its own kind of mind:

a curtain meant to protect nothing, no castle of sky

creeping into view.

And what of the morning?

The newspaper troubles whatever glow

defined by the light.

Don’t worry or wonder—

the world contains enough rubble

for the weight of every

body and for the weight of every body

we might imagine a space filled and emptied

again. In denying yourself

you deny a crucial part of the storm.

Along the Edge of a Season

Distant roads brought together

in a way described

as anything but pliant. Instead it seems

normalcy might suggest a stifled inspiration

destined to exist

as a hallway exists:

hidden between the rooms,

the Iowa of a house,

the Tuesday in a week with no Wednesday.

Somewhere a truck

does not turn over. It seems

there are no middles

anywhere—there are only

logical lists in sensible places.

Perhaps calling my view

of the world palindromic suggested

you wanted a window to work

both ways, that you

wanted coffee to put you to sleep.

Disregard the snowbanks in your mind.

Remember that ice expands

as it freezes—its memory doesn’t

defer to urgency or to what

we desire. Snow

and legs keep moving through

the world listlessly. So much

for floorboards. So much for

absence that I once admired

or even desired as if

the world was in my shirt pocket

waiting to unfold

and scatter into the space between

the two of us. You suggested a shadow

could be musical

or that the neck of a giraffe mimics

the way some trees

stretch toward the sky,

free of knots and free of

the mark of history

upon them. It’s easier to say

the word quaint than to be that way.

Was your attempt at sensibility

a worthy one? I don’t know.

I don’t know how to place the weight of a breath

behind the eyes. Money is a strange sort of memory:

remember the market with nothing for sale?

Remember how we corresponded

for a month straight with words

corrupted from their meanings?

An ashtray wasn’t anymore.

Arbitration became so apparent

that suddenly knowledge (even