SOMETIMES A BELL WAS BURIED, SO IT WOULD NOT BE
SCAVENGED BY MEN & USES OTHER THAN THE SACRED

summons. Candelabra also
are still being discovered
buried, so many greyhounds
put to sleep after the race.

Do not let gradually poetry become complicit

in these withholdings
              of alarmings and light.

Let poetry continue the resurrections.

~~~

ADDENDUM

Who was it said AND

is the greatest
              miracle? Praise

be his/her name.

~~~

BENEFICENCE OF THE REAL

I said to the man, I do not know
if I am a good or a bad.

To be a good person,
he said, you must first be
a great animal.

(And so I let the crawl
come unto me.)

~~~

FOR THE DARK AND BLAZING TRUTHS

I.

And, we had not made the world.

First we were forced,
then freed to believe

we belong here. We are certain

of nothing except we are
not dead, and the dead are

more than us and harder to love.

 

II.

And, we had not made the world,

or the father and the mother
who will end, on an earth

that will end.

Or the fiction of Heaven, a detention
desired in the school
of our no longer being children.

 

III.

And, we had not made the world,

had not made the first child
or taught the first child to worship

where it meets
the mirror, where “I” is
the heading to
every exile and prayer is

for the exception, “Someone else,
lord, some one else.”

 

IV.

And, we had not made the world,

or the water raising a family of waters,
or the wind retenanting the trees,

or the squirrels that mete out their meals in tiny minefields,

or the fiction of the Garden,
or the apostrophe “s,”
which was the snake in that garden,

or the one tree in the vastness of all-going

to which we sometimes turn
to tell how far.

 

V.

In as many ways as the spider has known the wall.

As often as the wind,
              as often as the wind is

a child that must raise itself
every single time.

In the form of a cage,
              in the form of a cage
that will let the creature out:

We had not made the world.

 

VI.

First we were, then we were

freed to believe
we belong. We were given

names, a fellowship
made of earshot. We were given

bodies, a place to which others
might come. Were given

language, that monument
of admission, were given to believe

we belonged: “I am blue,”
says the breeze

thru the sky. “I am law,” say the trees
of their felled selves,

the pages. “I am here, with you,
under the public

and touchable trees,
vocabularies, incunabula

of our go-befores, fallen bits of bridge
for the going over

of the All Wall,” says the poet,

who also
had not made
the world.

~~~~~

Christina Davis is the author of Forth A Raven (Alice James Books, 2006) and a manuscript in progress, An Ethic. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Jubilat, LIT, Pleiades, Paris Review and other publications. She is currently the curator of poetry at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.