Poetry by Clive Matson

Poems

Newest Work (To see some earlier work click here: Culture and Kinship)

CHALCEDONY SONGS 11 - 20

Chalcedony Songs One and Ten have been moved to The Books section of this website. Currently songs 11 - 20 are in progress and are being passed around.

Song Eleven
© 2008 Clive Matson

Sunlight falls through sky,
                                      cascades
over redwood branches and tumbles
along pancake leaves,
                                can you see it?
                        Can you see mote beams
weaving a long tango with twiggy green?

Does light de-light?
                              De-light in laying
hands on bark and dirt and skin of rocks
and neck and whatever it meets?

Do we work the same way light does?
Do you feel photons beaming
from my hands when I scan
your cheeks and your shoulders? When I
slip my fingers in the lip of your shirt?

Do you warm in my infra-red? Do you tan
in the light
                touch of my ultra-violet?

I pour a huge stream of love
over your psyche and your body.

Sun pours a huge weightless, silent
waterfall of nanoly vibrating liquid
over everything,
                        everywhere
ubiquitous greens and blooms and reds
and purples and yellows!

How can light not delight?

Photon power embeds in chlorophyll
and climbs for eons
up through the food chain and erupts
light
        streaming out your eyes.

How can light not delight?
                                       Delight
in illuminating through psyche
memories of soul mate's quiet swagger
and twining arms around my joyful back.

Peer around pictures like flattened
cans in a recycler's cart,
tip cranium and
                          elemental power sluices in.
Electro-magnetic waves
clean the windows.

What are you, my heart, with your plot line
dancing on its fanned-out past?

Sunbeams rotate through redwoods
like spokes of a slow wheel.

We whirl into each other's worlds
on light's saw blades while molecules shriek
and virtualize and as the shrieking
cuts deeper
                   I'm cushioned in the softest
womb with fairy lining of enfolded
stars and blood and warm gardenia.

Look me in the face. Show me
the glow of your eyes, love.
                                          Let's absorb
and radiate this punishing and clarifying light
while the universe
                              sucks us into its belly
and spins us around.

CULTURE AND KINSHIP

Clive Matson has eight published books of poems, and several manuscripts in process. Why poetry? Read what Clive says about writing his first poem:

excerpt from BREATH OF INSPIRATION (Presumptions, no. 18/19, Berkeley: 1987)
    Our kinship is as human beings. Is there, within the writer, a sense of what is important for the culture at large? When I wrote the early poem about the wind, I simply wanted to present it to my teacher. I was not asking to be honored for my style, or for the intellectual insights; I was making a gift of my experience. Today, my writing feels complete when it connects my conscious mind with my core, with the external world, and with the human community. Poetry is an act of connecting.     Although our culture has spectacular communications, the media transmit a surfeit of images of greed, envy, and desire for possession – material and sexual. Our situation can be compared to the culture of the Orkney Islands, described by Edwin Muir in LECTURES IN AMERICA. Isolated through the winter months families there celebrate the arrival of a single supply boat at each island with feasts and story-telling. Similarly, we are surrounded by a storm of images – like wind, hail and branches scraping at the windows – while the real person is barricaded inside, alone and isolated. Poetry has the power to bridge that isolation, especially when it contains a wide range of feeling and insight. Poetry is a vehicle for consciousness.
    To realize that power, poetry must be honest. We cannot know if our writing is reaching another person, not direct the words so they will – not with complete certainty. But a democratic belief that people are similar at their cores deepens my sense of inspiration. I could not feel truly connected if I wrote a falsehood.
    So in order to be satisfied with how my words caught the wind, and to feel part of the community, I simply needed to be accurate. I needed to be true to what I felt inside, and to the wind rustling the chaparral, across the meadows and veering off my face. Blank Blank
© 1997 Clive Matson

Thoughts drop toward emptiness
like iridescent lusters and rusted
table knives. This one. The next.

How the family voice transmits
faithfully on the telephone.
How an aching breastbone
seeps into thighs and feet.

These churnings bend from one
to the other and they link,
this thought to the last,
to the next. They make
a spiky fringe in empty

space

that waits. Silent. Dark. Knowing.
Blank space illuminates and ignores
any soft or stark-edged thoughts.
Blankness beyond harm, beyond words.

Beyond jet fighters, beyond rattling
in the car, beyond e-mail flickering
on the screen, beyond the cluttered
kitchen sink and everything in it.

Emptiness exists. Waits
for the noise to cease.