Circling the Ordinary: A Look at “How Could I Have Known” by Clint Margrave
What I love most about Clint Margrave’s poems is their striking simplicity and the way they sneak up on the reader with surprising affective force. His work can be described as measured perception, sincerity without scaffolding, authenticity over technical display and language games. There’s a confidence and emotional intelligence in how he inhabits his own experience, trusting that readers will meet his poems in good faith.
“How Could I Have Known” hooks the reader’s attention for just how undramatic it is. There is no spoken tragedy, no source of the speaker’s feeling, just uncertainty and a quiet, existential loneliness. Short, clean, isolated lines of disconnected truths slow the poem to a curious, crawling pace:
The moon outside the window
made no sense at all.
The starfish.
The butterfly.
The seagull.
The people
with their secrets.
Life doesn’t ever add up, does it? Cosmic, domestic, marine, and aerial images arrive unassimilated and without narrative logic, connected only by the notice we lend them. Time often carries on without ceremony, moving forward without reason or rescue. As children, our repetitions feel like rituals—small habits drawn against life’s bewilderment.
That boy on a blue bicycle
still out there
riding circles
around the neighborhood.
We lean on simple routines, circling the unknowns cushioned by the idea that someone else has the world under control. At some point in our adult lives there is the realization that our sense of uncertainty hasn’t disappeared, and there is no presumed authority to demystify the world for us. The boy on the blue bicycle is not explained or poetically amplified—he is simply seen, held in the poem’s attention, which becomes the only voice still keeping track of him.
The genius of “How Could I Have Known” works by subtraction. Its power lies not in accumulating performative metaphors, but in the quiet space it creates for shared attention between poet and reader. Margrave asks us to remain with what does not resolve, to circle without arrival, look at life that “makes no sense at all,” and to continue observing anyway.
