Still Working It Out. Brad Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ Journal Award)

      Relief: “One A.M., Mid-January,” “Compost,” “Step away from the closing door”

      Ruminate: “Self Portrait w/ Icon,” “The Yoke”

      St. Katherine Review: “January,” “Fr. Nicholas” (section 3)

      Spiritus: “Vocation”

      Suss: “From Here I Cannot Say What Kind It Is”

      Tar River Poetry: “Instant Karma”

      Wind: “Time. Coffee. Rain”

      Windhover: “Mary”

      The following poems appeared in the chapbook, Self Portrait w/ Disposable Camera (Finishing Line, 2012: finalist for Black River and White Eagle Coffee Store Press chapbook contests): “On Little Boys & their Guns,” “Cecil McBee’s Right Ear,” “Instant Karma,” “Simple Enough,” “Washing Dishes After the Feast,” “In Your Absence,” “On the Way to Putnam,” “Love Song,” “The Exhibit,” “Stepping through mercury,” “Step away from the closing door,” “So It Goes,” “Time. Coffee. Rain,” “What I Answered,” and “Self Portrait.”

      1

      The Exhibit

      Over on Lexington, in the glassy foyer

      of Saint Peter’s Lutheran, four

      Fujimura paintings, the largest

      a two-panel sea of blues and greens

      with—faintly—a fruited quince emerging

      or disappearing, like the entire New York skyline

      in the holiday blizzard we stepped back into

      early that afternoon, threading our way home

      around abandoned taxis. Pushing through the best

      of the storm’s windblown drifts, down each

      unplowed block of the graying city,

      no more than ten souls in sight—all boots

      and mittens, scarves and hats—and finally,

      above the intersection we call ours, maybe thirty pigeons

      playing mid-air, like children or bundled tongues of flame

      not quite ready to complete their ecstatic descent.

      If I could, I’d paint it—the appearance

      of the likeness of the glory of the Lord—after

      late Turner. No borders, no date, no discernible time

      of day. Only the relative coordinates:

      West 51st Street at 9th Avenue.

      Though really it could be almost anywhere.

      Time. Coffee. Rain

      for JGD

      We’ve not seen such rain for months. And maybe

      because of the storm, or what fell from the cheek

      of a young girl asleep in Malaysia, Charlie Hunter’s

      jazzy cover of Marley’s Natty Dread just leapt

      onto the cafe’s new stereo. Here on the fat edge

      of this window counter, as I relish having scored

      a parking space within steps of my weekly coffee stop,

      I elect to consider a notion I’ve heard for decades,

      that it’s better to enter heaven minus sinful parts

      than be thrown undivided into hell. I get a picture

      I don’t like of me standing at that threshold, various

      limbs, organs, glands tagged, “Property of Hell,”

      and suddenly I’m aware that neither the prospect

      of gaining heaven whole nor the anticipation of shame

      at having given hell even the slightest satisfaction

      has proved sufficient to effect the good result.

      Sure, I’d like to be pure in heart; I’d like to see God,

      but these days I’m trying to be kinder to my body.

      Besides, tonight after his lesson at Longy, my son and I

      are on to hang around the square and, after burritos,

      settle ourselves at a front table in a hotel jazz club

      to witness firsthand Charlie Hunter’s eight-string magic.

      I’m holding two tickets for the ten o’clock show,

      and if the radio weather man’s on target, by the time we

      hit the road home this rain should be well out to sea.

      Still Working It Out

      for Robin Needham, killed in the 2004 Christmas tsunami

      Something

      shuddered in the un-

      fathomable dark, and a wave

      shouldered forth

      like an eighteen wheeler

      skidding sideways

      into oncoming traffic—a wave

      inhering by the power

      of a word lovely

      as snow on a navy sleeve,

      the same word

      that shuddered in each

      dark cell of the dead

      Christ, a wave shouldering forth

      like a new heaven, new

      earth, clearing away

      the old, the impossible—a wave,

      a word, terrible as it is

      great, great as it is holy

      and terrible.

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