George David Clark

Black Igloo

The shadows thrown
by snowcaps here are thin

as hose or onionskin,
and what the clouds

cast massive over town
is not so proud

that it won’t scatter
once the South howls in.

At two the street-lit lawn
still squints our shades;

by dawn the focal
watts of sunshot want

to soak us in their flashy
spill, to flaunt

light’s violence past
the glass and chintz blockades.

For rest, we’ll need
an umbra old enough

to stand, a feat of cold
in loam-dark bricks

paroled from antique
drawers and frosted fixed

with all the chrome
eclipses we can slough

out sleep by hand. We’ll leave
no doors. No cracks.

We’ll steep our eyes
beneath a dome of black.

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George David Clark’s first book, Reveille (Arkansas, 2015), won the Miller Williams Prize and his more recent work can be found in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Image, The New Criterion, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He edits the journal 32 Poems.