Saturday Poetry – ‘Proof’ – Tiana Clark

Saturday Poetry – ‘Proof’ – Tiana Clark

This week’s Saturday Poetry brings you the soul-stirring poem titled ‘Proof’ by Tiana Clark. For this edition of Saturday Poetry, we have paired Santana’s emotive words with mobile art by the talented @darkkosmou with the captivating artwork titled ‘Randomly layered emotions’ complementing the poem’s essence beautifully, creating a symphony of emotions.

Tiana Clark holds a BA from Tennessee State University and an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Clark is the author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2017 Furious Flower Poetry Center’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Clark teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters and is the Graze Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

“Some poems tattletale on us before we are ready to admit what we don’t know about ourselves. I started writing a version of this poem years before I knew I was ready to write the poem until it spilled out almost fully formed after a season of false starts. My process needed to let the messy content spill out in scribbles and scraps. I needed more time, space, empathy, forgiveness, healing, and distance to access the essential truthiness to write about my divorce. The poet’s gaze can be ruthless, so it was vital to implicate the ‘self’ in these couplets.”—Tiana Clark

I once made a diorama from a shoebox
for a man I loved. I was never a crafty person,

but found tiny items at an art store and did my best
to display the beginning bud of our little love,

a scene recreating our first kiss in his basement
apartment, origin story of an eight-year marriage.

In the dollhouse section, I bought a small ceiling fan.
Recreated his black leather couch, even found miniscule

soda cans for the cardboard counters that I cut and glued.
People get weird about divorce. Think it’s contagious.

Think it dirty. I don’t need to make it holy, but it purifies—
It’s clear. Sometimes the science is simple. Sometimes

people love each other but don’t need each other
anymore. Though, I think the tenderness can stay

(if you want it too). I forgive and keep forgiving,
mostly myself. People still ask, what happened?

I know you want a reason, a caution to avoid, but
life rarely tumbles out a cheat sheet. Sometimes

nobody is the monster. I keep seeing him for the first
time at the restaurant off of West End where we met

and worked and giggled at the micros. I keep seeing
his crooked smile and open server book fanned with cash

before we would discover and enter another world
and come back barreling to this one, astronauts

for the better and for the worse, but still spectacular
as we burned back inside this atmosphere to live

separate lives inside other shadow boxes we cannot see.
I remember I said I hate you once when we were driving

back to Nashville, our last long distance. I didn’t mean it.
I said it to hurt him, and it did. I regret that I was capable

of causing pain. I think it’s important to implicate
the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean.

There is still some residue, some proof of puncture,
some scars you graze to remember the risk.

 

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