Musician-Writer Cliff Bernier in Poetry

If Words, Like Love, Like Poems, Never End

for Clifford Bernier

Before opening, I light candles, incense 

flames rising like the chants of monks.*

I bake fish, for scent of sea more than my

off and on pescado ways. The wind

is cold today. I sojourn to forest and beach,

imbibe on your verandah. Harmonica phrases 

quiver through the doorway. Sun glare, wist,

pollen seeping through old window frames, and

God knows what brings the migraine that has your 

lines waving and dancing. Already adrift, I welcome

microgravity, transience, floating, the spark

of light in which we may not even be finite.

*from Kathmandu, 

Earth Suite (p. 10).

I sit in my Writing Nook with five books that fuel dreams and movement, and inspire me, all written by Clifford Bernier — poet, musician and friend. Cliff composes poetry that weaves through art and nature  — sensual, remote, urban, romantic, and lyrical. 

It’s powerful  to spend time with great poems, like being thrown a rope — how they seep into one’s worldview, freshen what was stale, make room for change within us, which is also to change the world. It’s phenomenal to have friends like Cliff in this literary community who  profoundly impact my solitary world, with whom I’m also fortunate to enjoy music, workshops, and readings.

Cliff honored me in asking for a blurb for his 2025 collection Wetlands (Broadstone Books). I said this:

In his beautiful, lyrical collection, Wetlands, Cliff Bernier makes surprising connections that puts the reader at the crossroads of contradiction on one level, while above and below, in the sky and water, meanings in images resonate as clear and true. Through witness of the natural world, capturing a Taoist-like feel of reverence and movement, Bernier reveals understandings of human relevance — imagination, reality, invention, time. “Of what can be seen and what cannot. / Of the light-smeared pastel forest,... / of my fugitive joy, my lingering doubt, / the worm in the wood, my secret regret. // of my hidden hope.”  Like meditations, these poems invite return visits, offering different shades of insight with each pass, challenging perception to both reach out toward the fantastic and in toward personal connection with words, neighbor species, the river. In Wetlands, Bernier gifts us a marvelous, soulful collection.

Cliff’s other collections, each with their own character, are equally captivating, rich, and insightful. I wish to share a poem from each of his other collections that have been keeping me company for the past several days. 

From Ocean Suite (Finishing Line Press, 2024):

Pacific Coast

If beauty is peace

and peace is meaning,

then beauty is meaning

and the folding waves

on this freckled beach

is meaning. Ask the gull

balancing the wind.

The driftwood on the bank.

Sea grass like mustard

on the dunes, and the

relentless mist. They know.

From The Silent Art  (Gival Press, 2011):

Appearances

This is the message of the Wu Li Masters: not to confuse the type of dance

they are doing with the fact that they are dancing.

Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters

1.

In the music of this place

color reveals absence.

As you reveal yours, by your presence.

Let’s pretend. Take my hand.

Admire the blueberry field.

Crush a blueberry on your tongue.

Such sweetness cannot abide.

A sarabande. Then it’s gone. 

2.

But stay. 

From Earth Suite  (Finishing Line Press, 2010):

The Oriental

There is a table at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok

on the verandah beside the Chao Phraya river

where we ate dinner the day you were granted your visa

that allowed you to enter the United States

as a permanent resident married to an American—

the marble floor was sleek as the marble of our table,

where Somerset Maugham once ate, a plaque said,

while the slim long boats slid past or parked at the market upriver, 

and ferries crossed over to the Temple of the Dawn

erected on the far bank like a huge phallus,

in the waning sun that fell from the wakes of the boats like money,

which is what we wished we had, there, on the verandah,

though we had none—at least, not enough to pass the night,

in celebration, our belongings back at the four-dollar guesthouse

thet smelled of piss and vomit and come,

and I needing to buy a clean shirt to get in, since I had been refused

at the Lord Jim room before the grilled meats and the fine curries,

the fragrance of frangipani and the tropical fruits,

the odd music as the lights of the city flicked on. 

From Dark Berries  (Pudding House Publications, 2009):

Blood and Bone

for Dean Blehert

I have studied the geometry of bone and blood:

the slant of the sun like a bone in my eye,

the tangents and terms of the bone in the text,

the arc of the bone in the slope of the trunk,

the blood of the stream drawn straight from the vein,

the pressure and pulse of the blood in the root,

the angle of blood in the gutter at dawn;

I have read in the lamplight your theorems of bone, 

the blood of the bone in the spine of the book.

I’m grateful for Cliff, his poetry, and his expressive harmonica playing. And I just learned that his latest collection, Bakary and the River (Finishing Line Press), will be released in July and is available for pre-order. I highly recommend Cliff’s collections or, in the words of the Great Reuben Jackson, may he Rest in Peace, from the back of The Silent Art, “And while these poems demand our full attention, they are as accessible and as moving as a walk in the forest. Let this music in your life.”

Cliff’s bio:

Clifford Bernier’s The Silent Art won the Gival Press Poetry Award. He is also the author of Dark Berries and Earth Suite, each selected by the Montserrat Review as a Best Chapbook, and of Ocean Suite and Wetlands. His collection Bakary and the River is forthcoming. He appears in The Write Blend poetry circle collection among other print and on-line journals and anthologies. In addition, Mr. Bernier appears on harmonica in the Portuguese Accumulated Dust world music series and is featured on the EP Post-Columbian America. He has been featured in readings in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he is a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Bethesda Writer’s Center. He has been a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. From 2003-2008 he hosted the Poesis reading series in Arlington, Virginia and performed with the Jazzpoetry band at venues in and around Washington, DC. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Award. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.