Amateur Hour

Charlie Clark

The clouds here are beautiful in the manner of my wife’s hands.

They are pleasures with strange limits, and change color quickly.

In this way, they are like most beautiful things. Take songs.

In the car, when my wife turns the volume knob it’s to make the sadness louder.

During the commercials or the jockey chatter after, I worry I’m depressed.

But just because I might be depressed doesn’t mean I’m serious.

To be serious is to have something unwavering inside you.

And, oh, how I waver. I’d write anything so long as it was beautiful.

It’s beautiful to touch either of my wife’s hands.

My wife’s hands are warm as flagstones set out beneath the sun.

When I touch them the ringing in my ears becomes the tuning of viola strings.

I think it was something like this that made Andre Breton write “Free Union.”

But his enumerations get tedious. I’ll limit mine to my wife’s hands, then.

My wife’s hands invented the word abode. When she folds them,

my wife’s hands are tighter than the onion where all time goes.

One day it snowed and my wife put her hands inside the snow.

They came out flush as the blood in the heart of a swan.

When she put them to my face I could not feel my tongue.