"I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms"
----Wallace Stevens
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird"
John Thomas Clark
A retired NYC elementary school teacher,
John Thomas Clark lives in Scarsdale, NY with his wife Ginny, his daughter
Chris, his son John and Lex, his black lab service dog. Currently, over
one hundred of his poems are appearing in OCEAN, The Barefoot Muse,
Byline, The Centrifugal Eye, EFQ, The Healing Muse, Tiger’s Eye and
thirty-one other journals. The Joy of Lex – his
light-hearted romp recounting life with Lex – will be published in book
form later this year with an introduction written by Dean
Koontz.
John Thomas Clark
My Morning Pick-Me-Up
We’re not sure if Gioacchino Rossini
preferred
his caffeine like Honore Balzac,
fifty cups of the finest grind, all
black,
daily. Did he like his capuccini
with extra milk? Not likely. Espresso
was key.
Up on coffee, he told Honore,
he’d need fifteen to twenty days to
score
an opera. For me, to fluoresce so,
a four-footed firkin of inky coffee
greets me
each morn. The steely aroma,
the anima of Lex is the soma
I
need to write. I look in those toffee-
colored eyes and know worlds, formerly seen
afar,
close up, through the heady brew of my café noir.
www.lucidrhythms.com
© 2008 David Landrum