top of page

My Clarity

by

L. Ward Abel

The process: the chipped

paint-frayed window screens, the wasp nests of last year

that don’t have a purpose, the tufts of old-man-gray

dusting the yard; all and more toll a passing.

It attracts a glassy eye.

Rare clarity has the

opposite effect of a circling drain, putting back and

into commission precedent things, ones that still live and

ones to come, only because they’re given life and infuse

an idea.

Consider the words:

memories follow like shadows painted on

a page, never completely erased even when

the bone-house is gone.

Not quite a Grecian urn—

more an unfrozen scattering: unbeautiful, untrue

mirror-flashes from the smallest of all hours.

But no museum can hold these leavings. Only

a mind-sized universe can.


L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Reader, The Istanbul Review, The Worcester Review, The Honest Ulsterman, hundreds of others, and he is the author of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including Jonesing For Byzantium (UKA Press, 2006), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited Press, 2019), Floodlit (Beakful, 2019), and The Width of Here (Silver Bow, 2021).

L. Ward Abel
L. Ward Abel
Share on:
You might also like:

A Successful Man

The Seasons

bottom of page