To Make Room for the Sea

Poems

Adam Clay

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781571314970
• eBook ISBN:
  9781571319722
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"The more I sit with these poems, the more they resonate with me and with universal patterns and themes—existential inquiries, loneliness, spiritual doubts." — Green Mountains Review
To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent. Led by an introspective speaker, these poems examine a landscape that resists full focus, and conclude that "it's easier to love what we don't know."
"I hold this leaf I think / you should see, but I can't quite / say why," Adam Clay writes, as he navigates a variety of both personal and ecological fixations: disembodied bullfrog croaks, the growth of his child, a computer's dreaded blue screen of death. The observations in To Make Room for the Sea convey both grief for the Anthropocene and hope for the future. The poems read like field notes from someone who knows the world and hopes to know it differently.
On the precipice of great change and restructured perspective, Clay's poems linger in "the second between taking in a vision and processing it," in the moment when the world is less a familiar system and more a palette of colors and potential.
To Make Room for the Sea delights as much as it mourns. It looks forward as much as it reflects. Deft and hopeful, the poems in this collection gently encourage us to take another look at a world "only some strange god might have thought up / in a drunken stumble."
"That's the magic of this book—the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page." —Maggie Smith
"Draws from an impressive repertoire of forms to tease out complex questions regarding time, epistemology, and memory." — Publishers Weekly

Contents

Good-bye to Golden Nights

Last Anniversary

Mississippi Elegy

Go Birding

How Do You Feel about Ashbery?

Meditation for the Silence of Morning

At the Heart of a Multitude of Things

Only Child (III)

Found in Translation

How the World Began

The Seams Don’t Show

Now Warm and Capable

Understories

In Bed and Where Is the Sun?

Acre, Heather, Square

For a Turtle Eating a Strawberry

A Joke about How Old We’ve Become

Blue Screen of Death

Only Child (II)

Ghazal for a Farewell Transmission

The Terror of Flight

America

State of the Union

My Thought Is Only a Mirror for Yours

Form of Love

Just Off a Highway in North Central Missouri

Elsewhere

Immortality for Mary Ruefle

The Art That We Are

When the Whale Becomes the Wave

Where the Map Is

What Shines Does Not Always Need To

Watching You Make Dinner

Fall Bird

Exile

Finding Yourself in a Museum Gallery

No Longer Yours

Broken Form

Sonnet

Taken Off the Bone

Domestic Barbarians

Only Child (I)

Uncovered at the Falls

Confluence of Objects

And Late …

If I Could Write Small Enough, These Words Would Fit on the Back of a Postcard

For Broken Things

In Praise of Unknowing

Acknowledgments

And from growing dim, the coals
Fall alight. There are two ways to be.

–JOHN ASHBERY

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

–ROBERT HASS

TO MAKE ROOM FOR THE SEA

Good-bye to Golden Nights

If measuring

one’s life circular

makes sense of movement,

then how should

we muscle meaning

into days? As if we end up

where we’ve dreamt,

starlight for eyes

and train whistles

within the folds

of memory. Then one story

arrives before another

ends, not rounded

with possibility

but carved down

to an orchestrated stutter.

We catch a glimpse

of self within the self.

Hope swims better than

it flies, arriving beneath

the smooth surface

of possibility with unseen

silent movement. No one

cares for the self

with as much bravado

as the mind, its expanse

opens like a shorn fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Good-bye to Golden Nights
• Last Anniversary
• Mississippi Elegy
• Go Birding
• How Do You Feel about Ashbery?
• Meditation for the Silence of Morning
• At the Heart of a Multitude of Things
• Only Child (III)
• Found in Translation
• How the World Began
• The Seams Don’t Show
• Now Warm and Capable
• Understories
• In Bed and Where Is the Sun?
• Acre, Heather, Square
• For a Turtle Eating a Strawberry
• A Joke about How Old We’ve Become
• Blue Screen of Death
• Only Child (II)
• Ghazal for a Farewell Transmission
• The Terror of Flight
• America
• State of the Union
• My Thought Is Only a Mirror for Yours
• Form of Love
• Just Off a Highway in North Central Missouri
• Elsewhere
• Immortality for Mary Ruefle
• The Art That We Are
• When the Whale Becomes the Wave
• Where the Map Is
• What Shines Does Not Always Need To
• Watching You Make Dinner
• Fall Bird
• Exile
• Finding Yourself in a Museum Gallery
• No Longer Yours
• Broken Form
• Sonnet
• Taken Off the Bone
• Domestic Barbarians
• Only Child (I)
• Uncovered at the Falls
• Confluence of Objects
• And Late …
• If I Could Write Small Enough, These Words Would Fit on the Back of a Postcard
• For Broken Things
• In Praise of Unknowing
• Acknowledgments