Stories Dwell

 Stories dwell

John Clare Stokes

Shhhh, here comes another interloper 

Expecting a story from us

Let's just sit still and maybe he won't notice

Oh they so annoy us!

Make up one of the high climbing boy

Or the old hope chest from the attic

Embellish it with an exaggerated mystra 

Give them something to take them back.

Shhh,  but don't tell him our inner secrets

Soon he will tire and move on

Why, why do they expect us to speak?

Just take the shot and leave us alone.

Hansen

I know, if walls could talk 

Literary Analysis of 

“Stories Dwell”

by John Clare Stokes

Overview

“Stories Dwell” explores the tension between human curiosity and the silence of places, objects, and memories. The poem adopts a collective, defensive voice—suggesting walls, spaces, or witnesses that are repeatedly asked to give meaning or narrative to the past. Rather than romanticizing memory, the poem resists it, emphasizing intrusion, fatigue, and guardedness.

Theme

The central theme is the exploitation of memory—how people expect places, objects, or history to perform emotionally for them.

Secondary themes include:

• Privacy vs. exposure
• Authenticity vs. fabrication
• The burden of nostalgia
• Silence as resistance

Speaker and Point of View

The poem is written in the first-person plural (“us”), suggesting:

• A collective consciousness (walls, rooms, buildings, or artifacts)
• Shared weariness from repeated interrogation
• A defensive unity against the outside observer

This choice distances the reader and reinforces the idea that not all stories belong to the listener.

Tone and Mood

Tone: ironic, weary, guarded, quietly defiant

Mood: restrained, secretive, contemplative

The repeated “Shhh” functions both as a hush and a boundary, reinforcing secrecy and reluctance.

Imagery and Symbolism

Recorder / Shot

• Represents modern intrusion: documentation, journalism, photography, or historical extraction
• Suggests a transactional approach to memory—take something and leave

Invented Stories (boy climbing a tree, hope chest)

• Familiar, nostalgic tropes
• Symbolize the ease with which false or embellished narratives satisfy curiosity
• Suggest that audiences prefer comfort over truth

Hope Chest

• A symbol of inherited memory and expectation
• Often associated with preservation, yet here it becomes a prop rather than a truth

Walls

• Classic metaphor for silent witnesses
• Inverted here: walls could talk, but won’t

Structure and Style

• Free verse, conversational and restrained
• Short lines and breaks mimic whispered speech
• Minimal punctuation enhances the sense of secrecy and avoidance

The poem resists flourish, mirroring its resistance to storytelling itself.

Irony

The poem is itself a story about refusing to tell stories. This irony deepens its meaning:

• By fabricating examples, the speaker exposes how easily meaning is manufactured
• The poem fulfills the reader’s desire while critiquing it

Ending Analysis

“I know— / if walls could talk.”

This closing line:

• References a familiar cliché
• Undermines it by context
• Leaves the reader with an unresolved tension: the knowledge that stories exist, paired with the acceptance that they may remain untold

Interpretation

“Stories Dwell” argues that silence can be ethical. Not all memories are meant to be shared, recorded, or consumed. The poem reframes silence not as emptiness, but as ownership.

Just take the shot and leave us alone.

Midway Shade

Midway Shade

Johnclarestokes 

Great, great grandpa was patient with 

Great, great grandma's complaint 

There was no shade in Midway

Every tree went to cordwood stacked highly

To stave the icy winter shadows long slant.

It was in the long slant great, great grandpa

Planted the Camphor 

Great, great grandma was pleased

She'd have summer shade, eventually

Rocking in the long slant hymn humming 

It was great grandma who told great grandpa

Impatiently

When are you going to fell the Camphor

The long slant of winter gives me shivers

And great grandpa would promise, eventually.

It was grandma who told grandpa wistfully 

Do you recall Midway before the shade

Of all the promises in winters slant made 

And grandpa would rock and nod, silently

It was pa who in the Spring came visiting

This is where once in cold slant I played

Before in Midway the promise was made

Ma just stood under the Camphor, agreeing.

And so in the winter I came with my bride

The Camphor towering over the home place

And the bride saw the long slant upon my face

Of promises made and promises that died

Eventually.

Midway Shade

An Analysis of 

Midway Shade

Midway Shade is a meditation on time, inheritance, and the uneasy fulfillment of promises made across generations. Through the recurring image of a camphor tree and the repeated motif of the “long slant” of winter light, the poem explores how hope, patience, and regret are transmitted not only through memory but through place itself.

At the center of the poem stands the camphor tree, planted as an act of foresight and care. It is intended to provide shade—comfort deferred into the future. Yet from its planting onward, the tree exists in tension with human time. Each generation encounters it differently: as promise, as inconvenience, as memory, as explanation, and finally as reckoning. The tree grows steadily, but its usefulness arrives out of sync with the lives that awaited it. In this way, the camphor becomes a symbol of time’s indifference to human desire. Nature fulfills promises without concern for who survives to benefit.

The poem’s structure reinforces this idea through its generational progression. Each stanza shifts perspective subtly forward in time, marked by familial roles rather than individual names. “Great, great grandpa,” “grandma,” “pa,” and finally the speaker himself form a lineage that mirrors the growth of the tree. This genealogical movement gives the poem the cadence of oral history, as though the story has been told many times before, each retelling shaped by memory rather than immediacy. The repeated phrase “It was…” further underscores the sense that these moments are already fixed in the past, observed rather than relived.

Central to the poem’s emotional coherence is the recurring phrase “long slant.” Literally, it describes the angled light and shadows of winter, but metaphorically it expands to signify the slant of time itself—aging, decline, and the slow tilt toward loss. The “long slant” links physical cold with emotional chill, bodily discomfort with existential unease. As it reappears across generations, the phrase collapses decades into a single, continuous winter, suggesting that human experience repeats even as individuals change.

Tone plays a critical role in the poem’s effectiveness. The language remains restrained and unsentimental, relying on small domestic gestures—rocking, nodding, hymn humming—to convey emotional depth. Silence is as important as speech. Promises are made, questioned, remembered, but rarely resolved aloud. This restraint allows the poem’s final realization to emerge organically rather than rhetorically.

The concluding stanza marks a shift from inheritance to embodiment. When the speaker’s bride sees “the long slant upon my face,” the metaphor turns inward. The speaker recognizes that he has become part of the same pattern he has been recounting. The shade now exists, the promise technically fulfilled, but the fulfillment carries the visible cost of time. The final isolated word, “Eventually,” functions as both closure and judgment. It affirms that time does deliver, but never on human terms.

Ultimately, Midway Shade is not simply a family narrative but a philosophical reflection on deferred hope. It suggests that meaning is often realized too late to feel like reward, and that inheritance includes not only land and objects, but expectations and waiting. The poem’s quiet power lies in its acceptance of this truth without bitterness—only recognition. In doing so, it honors both the promise and the patience that sustained it.

Price Creek

 Hydrangeas for the pioneers

Johnclarestokes 

The pioneers of Price Creek

have long since in their planting

tilling

toiling

Scraping some living

resting from being 

Wary of the Indian

Going off to help Finegan

stave the Ocean Pond

Invasion

amid the carved stones

One by one

We plant for them

reminders of home

petal portals

upon the thresholds eternal.

Katie

 Katie

Johnclarestokes 

Perhaps I have met a living poet

Katie I once visited every Sunday

We called her group the R word

Before everyone became a bit

challenged with special needs

But Katie was the one person

who ever loved my three chord

Guitar playing

Or the harmonica serenade 

For sane ears not made

Katie at one Christmas party

Gave me a handwritten 

Bound book of poems she

Painstakingly penned 

in all caps it seemed

And in the years ensuing

And all the moving

The little book of simple poems

Went missing

And we quit going to Garden Park

On Sundays

And Katie I’m sure kept on

With her poems

I trust someone came into her

Life again

She could side up to and

Say, I just LOVE you.

Ciardi

 ciardi 

johnclarestokes 

I’ve yet to truly meet a living poet

Once I went to hear ciardi read

Especially the one of the scalpel

Or the knife

To cut and kill

Or to cut and heal

But mostly I’ve just read 

And wondered how 

The words they wrote

My spirit could cut, kill

And heal all at the same time.

Swallowing

 The memory of Tiger Swallowtail 

Gets us through the wintry travail

Tell me

 Tell me

John Clare Stokes

Over me 

silently came the

Osprey

tell me

of the sky

of the sea

of earthly 

mystery 

tell me

said he

of the eye

of the beauty

of earthly

artistry

Tell me

King Cobra

 Likes a snake

I sssslurrrr

I sssstaammmer

I'sss strriiikkkesss

I slllleeeepppp

King Cobra

That's what's for

Breakfast

Dinner

Supper

Room with a view

 Said the moon

To the Airbus 

Flying to Cancun

You’re much faster than I

So when you arrive

Meet me at the

Isla Contoy

And tip the bell boy

For the room with a view

Surfer Schmo’s

 Surfer Schmo's

john clare 

It was supposed to be carefree

Fun in the Vilano sand and sea

The surfer I imagined myself to be

A close knit band of brothers free

Living only for the next wave

To our own language we'd clave

From the rip tides each we'd save

Patience with the Barney all gave

But it just wasn't to be

Taking their play way too seriously 

Bitchin' and running off the Bennies

Daring anyone to enter their gnarly

And so I became a happy fruby

Never riding a wave with the dudes

Dwelling on my funboard in the shore break foam

A grey belly far from the homies.