AKA 'From the Ashes' is a bilingual poetry collection published by Huerga & Fierro in 2010
Excerpt from I
Nailed to the sheet with the blue trim, I held your skull with regard for the birds inside.
Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, blood of my blackest blood— I have the urge to put chemicals here so you can see the bottles, the cc, the stain in the test tube with the precise fluid. How can we counter this? The girl swallowed the acid and charred her tongue. She sang to me the other night under the stone vases on the balcony—It was like France except for the blood hardening her throat. We drank water and stared at our hands.
I have dragged it out of you, pulled it out by its knotty braid. I gave you sand. I gave you water. I stuffed the horizon down your throat. You asked me questions twice.
You gave me sand. You gave me water. You held my hair as I shook the plane’s wings. I asked you questions twice.
You are the hidden lover. I still cannot say if you are human. I’ve burned holes into you the size of pears. I’ve spread you wide as your tree. I gave you rough fruit to bite the air beneath my flesh. You gave me the taste of blood and roots.
Honey, can we stop all this? The child is trying to sleep. Where is he? What is my boy dreaming?
Excerpt from II
In Long Island, the phone rings and rings. At night, the bullfrogs vibrate in the swamp. In the day, the sun skims over the hypoglycemic pool.
This is where you first stabbed me pleasurably, this is where you left that whorl of dirt [and horizon . . . This is where our fathers knelt and smelt the fear in the bread of our body.
We rode bicycles through the night. The trees closed over us like wombs,
and the shiver of the leaves made us believe something was—
You said, “Gotta be home by midnight,” and my bike light hit your ponytail waving back and forth as you stood and pedaled off.
I no longer beseech you. As the barges tug down the East River, we press our noses to the car window and watch the trash carry away the gulls.
Excerpt from V
I wrote you letters that year crisp into the millennium.
I held the anguish in my arms heavy as a pig’s heart it was beautiful and thick and refused to bleed.
You flared out, and I saw your different yous, a peacock’s tail against the rain.
In Washington Square Park, the grass where we lay ripping out the pages cut from our loss ripping out the edges that sliced off our arms, ripping out the kiss the stain of your mouth kept, we walked under the stone arch while the hot dog vendors talked in Spanish.
The white curtain folds over those awkward figures, the nib punctures a wrist it pools on a glass table like ink.
Excerpt from VI
Dreams of grass, dreams of glaciers with black spots dreams of hawks cutting, dipping and gliding.
I find a bitter pleasure in finding you in the Grand Wagoneer. Sensual figure, long and sleek, in your black one piece, the tan sip of your lips, the sting of you as the gulls and children explode in the surf.
The simmer of sun into ocean into our throats closing over ourselves, gardenias rotting, three empty beer bottles clattering the back seat floor as we stop and then go then stop again.
A beautiful body erases intelligence, the brains walked upstairs socks in their mouths as our loveliness drowned a thousand pools, and the elegant ones sipped Southsides and talked of fucking and the weather.
Excerpt from IX
I went to the fancy new restaurant yesterday in
Tribeca
They brought me parts of you,
your wrist holding an African Daisy,
your belly button in a dollop of caviar,
your tongue smooth as a lemon slice,
and your lovely blood in a snifter.
I fell back off my chair laughing full with you
and whispered hatred for God.
Now I am taking you out of me,
carving myself out and pulling you
bone by bone
so you may live
even among this heaped wanting
that is never cured,
even among the billions of hearts pumping
and the terror of all that movement.
I’ve packed you a blue sweater
with a hummingbird on it.
I’ve packed you a pair of gloves,
I wouldn’t want those hands to get cold.
Excerpt from X
Do you remember the woman with the charred
tongue?
She sits beside me now
like a ghost.
I have watched her now for years,
counted the tiny blonde hairs on her calf.
I offer her sips of honey,
she has the urge to sing.
Performance by Cristina Spinei
Desde las cenizas (From the ashes) is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano based on the art and poetry of Steve Clark. I composed this work after seeing Steve's exhibit The Girl is Blue and Refuses to Sing, a collection of paintings that embeds fragments of his verse in each canvas. Equally as stunning as the paintings, Desde las cenizas was the perfect poetry to set for a song cycle.
Filled with dark, morose tones, I was drawn to Steve Clark's poetry for its inherent musicality."
Cristina Spinei
Review
(Click to read an English translation)
Review Translation
Steve Clark is a poet and filmmaker as seen in the feature length film, The Last International Playboy (2009) which he directed and co-wrote. This fact explains some of the traits of his work like the crystallization of particular instances, a narrative in sequence, and an idea of poetic development, which is not by any means the expected.
Clark proceeds by frames conceived as movements within movements which form part of a discourse whose full articulation we discover at the end. The reader finds himself before a universe of phrases that are only fragments, appearing in the text like the beads in a necklace with different colors, sizes and materials. What dilutes or distorts its unity (which it has, though difficult to decipher) is that the parts overwhelm the whole, which is almost annihilated by the impact of these certain fragments, which rise above the totality of the poem.
Hidden Lover
Before us we have what one might call "a text in fugue," whose elements detain themselves while it's centrifugal force becomes more intense from moment to moment. And this dynamism of meaning, which characterizes this force, comes synthesized by certain points, in which the poetic development gives the impression of forging into an apparent malaise. This contrast is one of the pistons that drives the book, if it not it's principal raison d'etres.
Already in the book's first movements we find the architectural procedure which will be the principal formula: an amply developed allocution – consisting of fourteen verses – which follows a fixed scene in the Comoros islands and could be defined as "ecological." Here a disappearing fan of expressions (I kiss you, I kiss me, I kiss I) gives birth to more images, not necessarily more explicit. However, they are stamped with an invocation that will later clarify and decipher all that was obscure before . . . The universe of the person invoked—"the hidden lover."
The second movement -- with its accumulation of images and chaotic enumerations, some bordering on surrealism – is much better. They contribute to the book's diction, its visionary stamp, and a rhythmic intensity which each time becomes more captivating. The third movement, in spite of it's novelties, is somewhat irregular and takes us back to the poetic dualities in the first movement, just as the fourth coincides with the second. However, the fifth follows its own mechanism, singling out -- from the preceding alternating currents -- a single physiognomy, like that of the curtain transformed into a song and the distinct images of streets and muscles.
A Beautiful body
Love—protagonist of the whole book—is even more present in the sixth movement, which is much less urban than the previous one because it occurs in a natural landscape. Perhaps this is why death appears on the horizon, and irrationality gives way to a certain degree of classicism. As seen in the gnomic phrase which announces: "A beautiful body erases intelligence." But since Clark is a poet more interested in variety, and the continual change of register and style rather than the traditional forms, in the seventh movement he opts for a kind of realism, and in the eighth for another poetic form, which in my opinion, is much more efficient and interesting. The ninth movement combines characteristics and procedures from the two previous ones, and the tenth consists of a narrative re-telling, which saves the final lyricism for the song that serves as a coda and we should interpret as the final development of all that came before.
From the Ashes is a unitary book written with a rare poetic method. And in this resides not only the book's merits, which there are, but also it's deficiencies which also exist. At times, the translation surpasses the quality of the original, above all in its rhythmic modulations. Steve Clark proposes a mixed system between cinematic language and the lyric that don't always coincide. As an experiment it's very honorable, but as an achievement not as much. He might have gone much further—I think—with a deeper knowledge of the forms and tools of tradition.