Janet's Cottage: Poems [Hardcover]

                        CLUTCH

Something like a clutch, the two of us
communicate the will to one another
to move, and as one turns the other must,
in contact with his mate, turn with her,
unless the pedal disengages them
and leaves them both to whine alone in air
without a way to know the other’s aim
or use their specious freedom from the pair.

If you protest my model of us makes
one the driving, one the driven, giving
one pride of place, recall life engine-brakes
as often as it climbs, and has us revving
loudest in our worst deceleration,
when on the half that had been blithe about us
is borne a little care with each gyration
to moderate our tumbling apparatus.

So they function best who come to grips,
and travel farthest fastest who beware
the mismatch of intention in the slips
that leave their coupling that much worse for wear;
let us therefore use our hard-won touch
to ride but not to ride it, me and you
pressing close together inasmuch
as is in us to be coming through.

D.H. Tracy’s poems and literary reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry,The Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review, Literary Imagination, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, andContemporary Poetry Review. He is the winner of the Intense Magazine Poetry Prize and served as editor of the Poetry Foundations online archive.
 

“These remarkable poems with their vivid phrasing and startling imagery may “rustle a while/in forever’s hourglass,” as D. H. Tracy puts it. I suspect that they will rustle a lot longer in that captious glass. There seems to be no form or mode of which this poet does not possess a sure mastery. There are reflective elegies which demonstrate his enviable cl#I