VSC President Emeritus Gary Clark was born and raised in New Haven county, Connecticut. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English and Drama in 1986, and from the University of Oregon with an MFA in Poetry in 1992. From 1996 to 2014, Gary led the Writers Program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, where he lives with his wife Laura and their three children. He was a staff artist from 1993 to 1994. His email is gpcjr@mac.com. You can read "The Old Ways" below.
THE OLD WAYS
For awhile I turned to honesty and openness,
but all that happened was the people I loved got tired.
After careful consideration, I have decided
it is now time to go back to the woods, build a fire, find a rock,
sit down, and share a poptart with my shadow,
as I used to do, see the flames flickering in my face
as the one place no one knows is there.
There used to be a time, not too, too long ago,
when things that sounded like this were actually like this,
when through a hole in my Carhartts I entered
new nowheres, great beautiful fluids bubbling up out
of the moss at my feet, distance and wind and quiet and dark
and clean and weightless and empty and easy and gone
and all the same thing as me, back then,
back there, where I argued and fought and cheated without fear.
One time, in an orchard sloping down toward a big lake,
arithmetic made sense, and so did leaving.
There was nothing to do, the cold apples were everything,
I drafted a letter made of miles and apologies.
Looking back now on everything, I wish a couple things:
first, that I could understand where things have gone,
and second, that you and I could always go.
Things could be easier, that little bird says, the way
they never were; we could be friends, I could learn to speak,
we could share a soda and pretend we were free
of the old ways, broken free, finally free.
