and raised in Pasadena, California, Killarney Clary was named after an Irish town ("It's not an Irish person's name -- it's like naming your child Chicago") and began writing poetry at 12. Her Los Angeles environs figure persistently in Clary's prose poetry. "Pasadena is an old suburb with that manicured quality and perfection and quiet that always gave me the creeps, stifling in a funny way, and yet it was my home. When home gives you the creeps it gives you an interesting problem. In Los Angeles there's all this blatant danger and yet it feels safer. A lot of my poems are about being on the freeway or getting from one side of town to another and what you see when you do that. Ethnically, L.A. has changed so much and feels so much more energetic than it did to me as a kid. A lot of things seem for the worse, but a lot seems really promising." Clary's cool, often ironic writing is laced with enigmatic notes of faith. "I'm not involved in a church or any regular organized religion. I do consider spirituality a big part of my life and have friends who feel the same way. In some ways it directs everything that I do, on my better days." Two notes. I wait for a third. If it doesn't come. . . if you don't come to weight me, then where is my shape, where is the space I fill? You don't come. No blow tenderizes my heart. My wrist turned in the dance is too light, unattached, a thing I knew better last week. Two notes in a standoff, the same in their stubborness. I would be weighted open, filled heavy. Saturate me as I am sinking, spinning in a thick eddy, draining, in search of the tonic. I wouldn't be alone. When you are the scrub jay, taillights in the fog, when I am compelled to find you everywhere, you still haven't arrived. I'm teased by the cloudy fire opal, a country of albacore snarling on itself, future in waterdrops beaded on a bare branch, shuddering free. They tell me there's warmth in these clothes, that I was born from you, that you are gone. Killarney Clary's book "Who Whispered Near Me" is published by Noonday Press. photograph by Kathleen Delano 1989