That Which Appears by Thomas A Clark

 

On the first page of Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark writes:

do you know the land

where bog cotton grows

That land is a peat bog in the Scottish Highlands. Knowing this setting is important insofar as it refers to a particular flora and geology, making it easier to imagine what he’s talking about. At the same time, a specific way of relating to the earth is being referenced, where intimacy with one’s immediate environment yields the ability to identify its rocks and flowers.

Clark’s question, arising from the poems themselves, further suggests a stance about poetic language, specifically its potential to direct us toward empirical presence and bring us to a particular place among flowers and stones. Taken to an extreme, it results in stanzas like the following:

a hanging valley 

of ash, wych elm, hazel

willow, birch, oak

dense cover of beech

light shade of ash

wintergreen, ramsons

sweet woodruff

guilder rose

hair moss, bracken

fork moss, oak fern

reindeer moss

Though here in this insistent barrage of names, a critical angle emerges, calling attention to language’s otherness from natural presences. Even at its barest essentials (“snow on moss on stone,” an entire page reads), devoid of any pathetic fallacy, language is still separate from reality, superimposing names on what otherwise is thus.

That Which Appears collects four book-length poems written between 1994 and 2017: That Which Appears, The Hundred Thousand Places, Yellow & Blue, and the aforementioned Farm by the Shore. Most of the stanzas look and feel like the “bog cotton” one, with no titles, punctuation, nor capitalization. Pages range in content from single 1-4 line stanzas to pages with 3 such stanzas, usually separated by a great deal of white space and feeling like brief appearances in an otherwise empty field. That Which Appears is therefore a fitting title, expressing Clark’s overall absorption with the process by which things come into appearance then disappear again, within language as well as without. 

it appears the moment 

it is mentioned

the hill of bog-cotton

appears and disappears

Indeed, Clark explores appearance and disappearance at innumerable levels, from the first two books describing perceptions of the landscape as they dawn, rise, and set over the day to meditations on the origination of things, as in the stanza that immediately precedes the “bog cotton” one:  

sea separates from sky

earth from sea

all things take shape

from darkness

That darkness might be read along a variety of religious, philosophical, metaphysical, or even geological lines, suggesting something like a play of void and presence. However, Clark’s line is to relate primordial emergence, to the procession of daylight, to the way things arrive to one’s perception. All things take shape from darkness, primordially, while also coming into view as light falls upon them. Once “alight,” things exist without our seeing or naming them, belonging to an unlimited, undifferentiated space:

beyond the deer fence

a stag bellows

unseen in

dawn light

in the possibility 

before things 

find their limits

As it resolves into focus, our perception–like language–gives limits to things. However, in the unlimited world beyond language, things that we are not currently encountering are not “nothingness.” The darkness is full of presence not yet perceived.

Alongside the fuzzy, ephemeral bog cotton, deer are a recurrent image. The graceful, secretive way in which they get around, merging with presence not perceived, is akin to Clark’s writing. Given the massive white space, the appearance of stanzas on the page can appear accidental, as if they too were “unseen” presence ever so slightly rising to the top. 

where all is so

insistently clear 

it will not do

something is hidden

a premise of which

the facts are a residue

nothing coincides 

with its representation

stop look wait

the visible is fragile

the call of a whimbrel 

might split it apart 

“Facts” (stones, flowers, deer) are thus residues of as well as entryways back into limitless experience. The way the stanzas arise out of the white space, largely unconnected by any storyline other than having appeared, makes them facts also, to be observed indiscriminately as any of the natural phenomena of which Clark speaks. 

This natural appearance and disappearance lacks cathartic human drama, but it retains tension by mimicking deep states of meditation where presence is gained unconsciously and lost through too much awareness.

if you tell yourself to look

then to look more intently

you add imperative

to imperative

if you tell yourself to look

then to look less intently

The keynote phrase “you add imperative / to imperative” ends one thought and heads off another, subtly transitioning two overlapping perceptions that could be read separately. This repetition, in which iterations subtly alter the meaning of a phrase, or change a single word of a phrase (“in the silence of the birchwood / snow melting from branches // in the stillness of the birchwood / snow melting from branches”) pushes language back towards that undifferentiated state.

These slight alterations and echoes further imply a resonance or feedback endemic to natural processes, an interconnectedness Clark perceives deeply:

the pondweed is held

by water

the pondweed holds

Here, the repetitive language actually serves nature, playing up the way that pondweed and water appear—literally exist—together through a grammatical loop. Lacking the ecstatic payoff carried by likeminded writers, say like Jeffers, he nevertheless reorients our perspective from manmade, productive time to the sway of seasons and geologic time through such small details.

where enquiry 

hurries on

the hill shapes

take their time

take your time

the rise and the swell

of the hills are yours

their weight and implication

rest and aspiration

The rise and swell of the hills are yours because “some part / of your mind / is limestone”: materiality is recombined over time (mountains eroding into soil, for example), consciousness is part of nature. Bringing the mind closer to these facts leads to a genuine feeling of disappearance into the hills and of bewilderment, remote from all “enquiry.” Taking your time is guidance and encouragement not to resolve that feeling, but instead to attend to the bog cotton, deer, flowers, and stones as they appear and disappear. 

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