Gould Community
for Gould, Oklahoma
By Ryan Clark
Nov 15, 2025
Nov 15, 2025
1.
Among a people free to leave
but who don’t, a community
is a collection of shared struggle
that gorgeously opens as a form
of home. The earned survival
of droughts and storms and failure
is a tough adhesive, for Gould
is a city they say of themselves.
Alive in a monument off the highway,
the granite holds sounds for you
to phonate as a way to join
memory to air again, to come
into being a known second
that stays hovering out of reach.
To forget this is to reacquire
the feeling of an unknown emptiness
you arrived into, unexisting.
2.
First, the city of Gould was incorporated
by an act of gathering endings
to trails some took to find what land
they could. Others fell into
Gould’s pool of trust out of
unsure townsites since unsighted,
taking with them a moving electricity
and the music of increase.
The haste of Gould tries to speak for
five hundred people in the mid-1930s,
an order held thriving in its area.
This is listed in the city newspaper
as the height of population, or this is
a song ridden with loss, or what
we pronounce when we say the name
of the town. What is a lens that dies
trying to hold one frame permanently
except this trending culture of nostalgia.
3.
Five active businesses sing
as a mapping of moment,
and even this now for those
who remain fades as an exhibit
passing on. We expect the present
to be a stain covering what had been,
though we know not to,
just as we know that
farming is a technique losing ground
to leaving relatives quietly waving
from their porch. Here are a people
working toward a better life,
for this is what a family says
is a future. Even erased,
this can be made a home.
Among a people free to leave
but who don’t, a community
is a collection of shared struggle
that gorgeously opens as a form
of home. The earned survival
of droughts and storms and failure
is a tough adhesive, for Gould
is a city they say of themselves.
Alive in a monument off the highway,
the granite holds sounds for you
to phonate as a way to join
memory to air again, to come
into being a known second
that stays hovering out of reach.
To forget this is to reacquire
the feeling of an unknown emptiness
you arrived into, unexisting.
2.
First, the city of Gould was incorporated
by an act of gathering endings
to trails some took to find what land
they could. Others fell into
Gould’s pool of trust out of
unsure townsites since unsighted,
taking with them a moving electricity
and the music of increase.
The haste of Gould tries to speak for
five hundred people in the mid-1930s,
an order held thriving in its area.
This is listed in the city newspaper
as the height of population, or this is
a song ridden with loss, or what
we pronounce when we say the name
of the town. What is a lens that dies
trying to hold one frame permanently
except this trending culture of nostalgia.
3.
Five active businesses sing
as a mapping of moment,
and even this now for those
who remain fades as an exhibit
passing on. We expect the present
to be a stain covering what had been,
though we know not to,
just as we know that
farming is a technique losing ground
to leaving relatives quietly waving
from their porch. Here are a people
working toward a better life,
for this is what a family says
is a future. Even erased,
this can be made a home.
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Ryan Clark is an Old Greer County native who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), as well as the chapbook Suppose / a Presence (Action, Spectacle). His poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Cherry Tree, The Offing, and Copper Nickel. He currently lives in North Carolina, where he teaches at UNC School of the Arts.
Website: ryanclarkthepoet.com |
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Author’s Note:
These poems come from a longer project which traces the history of a section of southwest Oklahoma that (until 1896) was part of Texas and which today includes many rural towns that have disappeared or are on the verge of doing so, as a result of drought and the systematic destruction of small-scale agriculture. In writing these poems, I used a unique method of homophonic translation which relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (ex: “cat” may become “ash” by silencing the ‘c’ as in “indict,” and by sounding the ’t’ as an ‘sh-‘ sound, as in “ratio”). The source texts for these poems are archival materials from the Old Greer County Museum in Mangum, Oklahoma (in the case of “Dugout Replica”) and the Harmon County Historical Museum in Hollis, Oklahoma (in the case of “Gould Community”).