Changing Your Story

Patricia Clark Smith

Patricia Clark Smith’s poems bring together a keen eye for family, friends, and lovers as well as a strong sense of ethnic and working class identity. Her poetry reflects a number of topics, including raising two sons, family matters in western Massachusetts and coastal Maine, epitaphs and memoirs of friends, and her own life as a teacher and transplanted westerner. Her humor and gentle toughness is reflected in her family poems, such as “Allouette,” and her meditation on class origins, “The Great Pat Smith Dream Poem.”    

“This is a bold, brave, and true book.  A woman’s book; a mixed-blood’s book; a New England/New Mexico book.  A poet’s book.  A fine work from an exciting American poet.”—Paula Gunn Allen

The last night I saw you, we were dancing,
it was Fats Domino, your good grin bopping
above most of that crowd.  The wind in the willow played,
the moon stood still.  Always
you were graceful who thought yourself awkward
in your West Texas accent, your long loose body.  I see you
teaching, laughing, fishing,
scooping up a child.  Dennis, how well,
how sanely you loved this world.

We said goodnight, see you maybe at Christmas,
though all the vows we made were never to be
you would send me the name of the young Kenyan writer,
I’d have Joy sign her new book In Mad Love and War
for you by next summer.

And now this morning the story long distance:
you dropping incredibly dead
with Beth your true love by your side
high on some Norwegian mountain, a blueberry meadow
where they don’t pick blueberries one by one,
drop them plink plank plunk down into a pail
the way Yankees do; oh no,
those Norwegians break off whole twig-ends,
slurp them deliciously through their mouths
and swallow great dusky clouds of berries.
This impressed you,
you, always a man easily thrilled.  Dennis,

you are part of me still,
and I imagine how it was,
you sort of dancing, your arms flung wide,
gold fillings glinting in alpine sun
and crying out just before you died,
how can we be glad enough
for such abundance?
            —“Blueberry Hill,” for Dennis Jones

5½ x 8½ inches • 61 pages • ISBN 0-931122-61-9 • $8.95