Marden J. Clark

Letters to the Editor

Life to the Spirit: A Rejoinder

My first reaction to Mr. Christmas and Mr. Driggs was to hurry back to my essay to see if I had really said those things. I seemed to be hearing myself through a kind of…

sonnet: on his blindness to autumn

i too consider how my days are spent 
and fret but little when like autumn’s bright
orange maples they fade and fall, my sight
is good enough to burn those maples, scent 

Art, Religion and the Market Place

Art and religion share a common end and a common enemy. The common end is the enrichment of the life of the spirit; the common enemy is the market place. That the end, or at…

Some Implications of Human Freedom

Let me begin by admitting that my title, and perhaps my entire paper, begs a major philosophical question. I am well aware of the age-old debate over the reality of free will. I am aware of…

On the Mormon Commitment to Education

In one of the more imaginative chapters of that remarkably imaginative trilogy Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien describes an Entmoot, a conference of giant tree-like creatures called Ents. Sam and Merry, two…

God’s Plenty

The harvest poured til you could bear 
            No more, till you 
Could neither know nor care. 

Toward a More Perfect Order Within: Being the Confessions of an Unregenerate But Not Unrepentant Mistruster of Mormon Literature

A title like that might indicate that I’m already half through. But it needed to be long to convey something of a lurid past that calls for “confessions.” “More perfect order within” suggests both the…

Much of a River

I guess it wasn’t really much of a river, only thirty feet wide or so where it had enough fall to ripple over the rocks. Except during the spring runoff. Then it filled and sometimes…

Lightning Barbs

I’d ridden this way a hundred times, 
Up Monday Town along the fence 
Dividing wheat from perennial sage 
Herding cattle to summer grazing 

This Is My Body

A deacon offers the broken bread. 
Aware of awkward wait as bishop 
Receives the bread of ritual first, 
I take it up, thoughtless of blessing, 

“I’d Rather Be…”

One of the popular bumper stickers of the fifties and sixties told us, “I’d rather be dead than red.” An even more succinct version declared, “Better dead than red.” I remember these slogans because they…

August 6

“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!” 
I went, thanking for the first time the crook 
In my spine that stopped me buck naked 
From buck privacy, and took me back to you 

On X-ing

crossed out—an inexact word in typescript 
            but not erased 
left unused—an unread book 
            but not unneeded 

Snows

That snow falling out there, not in flakes 
But in clusters of flake, little snow balls 
Loosened by November’s sun still barely struggling
Through the harvest haze, snow falling 

Razor Sharp

You, my father, 
Too damned independent at seventy-five 
To admit you could no longer handle 
A simple double-edge Gillette, 

August 6

“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!”
I went, thanking for the first time that crook
In my spine that had stopped me buck naked
From buck privacy, taken me back to you 
After a three-hour, not a three-year, separation.