Lorelei with wet hair riverine,
black delta, white beaches
coming out of her moonlight shower—
her cold, cold beauty is the chimerical
other for whom the subject’s
erotic longing is like a phantom itch
in a part of the body that died long, long
before we started to patrol this part of the river.
Dark eyes, and wet hair trailing in
the reeds like a subjective language of sedge
through which the divine current snakes.
Tom Clark
Tom Clark is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including White Thought (1997), Empire of Skin (1997), and Sleepwalker's Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991 (1992). He is also known for his fiction and nonfiction, particularly his biographies of figures such as Jack Kerouac, Ted Berrigan, and Charles Olson. He formerly edited the Paris Review, and currently teaches at the New College of California as an instructor in poetics.
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