Hope Springs

It must start somewhere, a hidden place,
well off the main road yet closer
than the music of small farms
that changes with the seasons’ light
and the rain’s direction, rain that finds
its own beginnings in music—the wind,
sun, and dry fields calling to
each other until their song falls
in a happiness untraceable
and sharp and maybe even a little
bit warmer than the thick air around you,
this air an excess of sorrow,
your deliberate god
that also started somewhere,
eternal and busy making
its own inscrutable hymn.

—Jeanne E. Clark

“Hope Springs” is from Jeanne E. Clark’s new book of poetry Gorrill’s Orchard, published by Bear Star Press this spring. It is dedicated to G.R.U.B., the local Community Supported Agriculture cooperative.

Clark teaches at California State University, Chico, and volunteers for Border Collie Rescue of Northern California. She is the author of Ohio Blue Tips (University of Akron Press, 1999), which was the winner of the 1997 Akron Poetry Prize. Her poems and prose have appeared in many anthologies and magazines including A Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio, Alaska Quarterly Review, Alehouse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, MARGIE, Quarterly West, and Willow Springs.