Tom Clark, Reverdy, and Pere-Lachaise in the fog [by David Lehman]

The redoubtable Tom Clark continues to post for Vanitas, where last night appeared a poem with a hard-to-resist title, "One More Saturday Night (for Reverdy's Ghost)," and this ravishing photograph (by Lothar Streidle, 2004) of Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris,

One More Saturday Night (for Reverdy’s Ghost)

Through the night
It snows on the
Sierras as it does
On the grave of
Apollinaire in the
Cemetery of Père
Lachaise
And on
The radio I get
Truck music from
San Jose:
“Want to make it to
Amarillo by
Morning…”
“...Just
Because you ask me to.”

The green oak
Burns weakly
In the grate
And as I write
In the window
Of the loft
The light
Turns blue.

– Tom Clark

The late Donald Hall said that "Tom Clark was the best student I ever had.” It was Donald Hall, who taught Clark at the University of Michigan. Hall, The Paris Review's longtime poetry editor, passed the torch to Clark, who chose the poems for the magazine in the late 1960s. It was a brilliant run. -- DL

Comments

[terence winch]

Tom has been cranking out a ton of terrific poems, on what appears to be a one-poem-per-day basis. I hope he keeps it going.