The Least of These

by Todd Davis

Overview

In his third collection of poems Todd Davis advises us that "the only corruption comes / in not loving this life enough." Over the course of this masterful and heartfelt book it becomes clear that Davis not only loves the life he's been given, but also believes that the ravishing desire of this world can offer hope, and even joy, however it might be negotiated.
     Drawing upon a range of stories from the Christian, Transcendental, and Asian traditions, as well as from his own deep understanding of the natural world, Davis explores the connection between the visible and invisible worlds, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God." 
     A direct poetic descendant of Walt Whitman, Davis invites us to sing "the songs we collect in the hymnals of our flesh- / impromptu, a cappella, our mouths flung open / in a great wide O."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870138751
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	01/08/2010
Pages:	125
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry—Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and coedited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year silver and bronze awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Read an Excerpt

The Least of These

POEMS

---

By Todd Davis

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2010 Todd Davis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-875-1

---

Chapter One

    And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible


    Everything shines from the inside out—
    not like the blaze of the sun, but like
    the moon, as if each of us had swallowed
    a piece of it. Our flesh opaque, milky,
    indefinite—the way you see the world
    when cataracts skim your vision.
    What so many mistake as imperfection—
    bulge of varicose, fatty tumor's bump—
    is simply another way for the light to get out,
    to illuminate the body as it rises.
    We're caught up all the time, but none of us
    should fly away yet. It's in the darkness
    when your feet knock dew from leaves
    of grass, when your hand pushes out
    against the coffin's lid. Just wait.
    You'll see we had it right all along,
    that the only corruption comes
    in not loving this life enough.


    A Memory of Heaven

    Ice is talking; water dreaming.
    Overhead darkness pinched by starlight.
    Below, in the mud of the world, turtle sleeps:
    everything fluid, formless without the light
    of a lantern. I must remember snow
    is enough to see by, and ice will tell us
    where we should step. At the end
    of the valley limestone swallows water,
    moon turns the trees blue, and red
    crossbills look for seed among hemlocks.
    Beneath the fields, water is talking
    in its sleep; ice quiets its dreams.
    What I write is always what comes after.


    None of This Could Be Metaphor

    The experts tell us dolphins strand themselves
    when they become disoriented, injured or sick.
    Yet such explanations fail as numbers grow.
    Off the coast of Florida more than forty
    belly themselves onto flats and sandbars.

    As the tide goes out, leaving less than a foot
    of the sea, more swim in. If the only stipulation
    for beauty is color and form, these corals the sun
    casts in rising and falling upon the lengths
    of their sides, the lines of their backs, would suggest

    a map, directions for a way back to the waters
    where none of this could be metaphor, where
    dolphins leap, not for some abstract notion
    of joy, but because it feels good to lift the body
    out of the arms of the sea, even if only

    for a matter of seconds, to feel the flesh fall
    back toward the current, the tide's movements
    tugged by the moon, the taste of salt, the refraction
    of light beneath the water's surface.


    The Face of Jesus

    Weasel wears the happy face of Jesus, yolk smeared
    at the smiling corners of his mouth. Like Mary Magdalene
    these hens give what is most precious, his feet perfumed

    by egg whites. Opossum wears the sad face of Jesus, eyes
    sleepy with death. Already his brother lies on his back, the red
    part of his life making the sign of the cross against a hash mark.

    Fox wears the sly face of Jesus, speaks in parables about cold nights
    and days covered in the silence of white fields. Coyote wears
    the laughing face of Jesus. The men in the hill country hunt him

    because he breaks the body of the yearling doe, gives thanks and sips
    from the cup of her blood. Bear wears the sleepy face of Jesus,
    belly bloated with huckleberries and nuts, with the fish

    he catches in the net of his claws. Squirrel wears the wary face
    of Jesus, knows the wind will betray him like Judas, all the acorns
    rotting, Owl plotting against his life.


    Stem Cell

    While he slept—head pillowed
    by a length of arm, naked on moss
    and the softest grass—she began
    to grow inside the marrow
    of his curved rib, inside the flesh
    that settles just above the hip, a bit
    of blood fresh from the final chamber.
    Out of this her head appeared, then
    the reach of humerus and radius, clavicle's
    bridge, and last the blush and promise
    of muscle's pink shadow. When her hips
    cleared his side, she stepped away, her wonder
    balanced by femur, her gaze upon the trees,
    the glistening shapes of fruit, upon the flower
    of her vulva from which more fruit would fall.
    Have you ever watched from a boat
    as catfish spawn? In this garden, chaos
    and fury shaped our love, but out of that shape
    something more: the voice of God,
    or the simple sound of wind
    among turning leaves.
    —After Bartolo Di Fredi's "The Creation of Eve" (1356)


    Confession

    Forgive me
    they were delicious
          —William Carlos Williams


    Like Williams and his plums, meat
    turning to sugar under skin, I confess

    my sin: I've eaten the apples
    that ferment in tall grass, abandoned

    when the life fell out of the place.
    With the first cold days, at night

    they freeze, then thaw a bit by noon,
    last warmth of October

    drawing these few incorrigible bees
    who still bother to venture across

    this rotting round globe.


    Tequila

    Cut rock climbs toward the roof of the distillery, slow erosion
    of mortar. Above the door's arch, loadstone laid more than four

    centuries ago bears the weight of walls, of the ceiling's rough timbers,
    of the lives the laborers gave to the incremental passage of night

    and day. A window with wooden doors opens inward, allows light
    to fall on the naked bodies of three young men, their hands resting

    on the edge of the giant vats that hold the juice of the blue agave.
    Without looking at one another, they lift in perfect sequence:

    backs of their arms shadowed, extension of triceps, buttocks splayed
    with work, leg and hip raised. As they writhe, this is their prayer,

    a sacrament to the way their fathers and grandfathers taught them.
    Like the crucifixes priests planted in the fields, this bitter drink

    cannot be made without sacrifice, their very bodies required
    to release what the plant hoarded for nearly a decade: taste

    of blackened soil, blood of ceaseless war, sweat of sun,
    of the love they gave to their wives the night before.

          —In Memory of Thomas McGrath


    Aubade

    Charles Burchfield hangs the moon a little lower and to the left
    because the tree has reached the sky. The sun is barely up
    and wind blows from the west, grass and leaves bending.
    This is less a painting than a musical score: trunk like the staff
    of a thundering chord, clouds on the horizon trilling, tympani
    thrumming wherever blue turns beneath the firmament.
    The artist sees the world vibrating at different speeds,
    each variation of color, form, composition. The tree shakes
    notes down, everything awash in the arpeggio of watercolor,
    fingers moving across the neck of violin, viola, cello, strings
    dabbed yellow and green and golden brown. This is what
    it sounds like when something grows: the division of cells,
    a part of the former becoming a part of the latter, the next note,
    the next song, which is a bridge to all the other songs
    and all the other trees that greeted the dawn, raised their arms
    and voices to the sky and kept singing even when they failed
    to reach it.
           —After Charles Burchfield's "The Tree that Reached the Sky" (1960)


    Craving

    In the dust of a February snow the coyote's track
    follows the deer's track. He sees in the hoof-dragged

    line of her stride a weariness that lengthens with winter's
    spiteful width, a labor he longs to release with the clean

    tear of canine, easy flow of artery. Along the banks
    the river runs faster, snow-melt and the quickening of time

    as sun throws down more light each day. A mink scores
    its trail, countering the river's course, and every twenty yards

    a pool of piss sugared with blood, with estrus' craving.
    We're always giving ourselves away, smallest parts

    of our bodies flying through space, neutrinos hauling
    the blood and dust and piss of our existence.

    How surprised the buck was when he approached
    my wife, her menses thick in his nostrils, and even

    when he realized her bottom was clothed, no doe's
    red vulva beckoning, he could not turn away.

    The coyote must be fed; the mink joined to her mate.
    My wife ran the dirt trail back to our house, collapsed,

    and later laughed at her own allure. Alone, wind
    coming up from the river, the buck must have raised

    his head, barely aware of the heart's insistent thump,
    as he tried once again to catch the stinging scent

    that spurs us on.


    Doctrine

    I love the church
    of the osprey, simple
    adoration, no haggling
    over the body, the blood,
    whether water sprinkled
    from talons or immersed
    in the river saves us,
    whether ascension
    is metaphor or literal,
    because, of course,
    it's both: wings crooked,
    all the angels crying out,
    rising up from nests
    made of sticks
    and sunlight.


    Letter to Galway Kinnell
    at the End of September

    I confuse the name for goldenrod with the name for this month,
    but what else would we call this time of year—afternoon light
    like saffron, blue lake reflecting blue sky? Where we entered,
    asters and goldenrod flooded the length of the meadow, field

    literally abuzz, swaying with the movement of bees, air
    warm enough to draw sweat and the smell of those flowers
    and our bodies drifting around us. The part of the sun that rested
    the kettle of heat upon the goldenrod's tiny, yellow blossoms

    lifted the clearing clean out of the ground, somehow suspending us—
    if not in air, then in time—and that's what we want after all.
    Not starting over, not being reborn, but borne up like these bees,
    or the birds who migrate toward a place of neverending, all of us

    unmoored, still part of the earth, but absolved of our obligations to it:
    the necessity of growing old, the bald fact that a month from now
    all this beauty will crumble—asters black, goldenrod brown,
    no more than flower-dust when we rake our hands across their heads.


    Half in the Sun

    This is the lit prayer of the shining world, the words
    that glisten like an oil stain—purple and dark in rain,
    mirror in sun. This is the liturgy of both/and that affirms
    our feet as they tread the earth, the bear of the world
    who wanders neighborhoods and dreams, who turns over
    garbage bins, then bounds away across manicured lawns.
    This is Ursus whitmana throwing his arms around
    the green ball of everything, the love he hoped could be
    carried in syllables, a pink heaven, ants dancing
    upon the tongue. This is the rot-sticky sweetness
    that lies down against the skin, finest hairs stuck together,
    the songs we collect in the hymnals of our flesh—
    impromptu, a cappella, our mouths flung open
    in a great wide O.


    Weather Report

    Snow won't fall for another hour,
    and while we wait we'll watch
    from our picture window
    as the clouds stride forward
    into the valley, old men
    with their arms thrown
    behind their backs, hats
    pulled down over ears,
    hair sticking out, brushing
    against the fields
    as they go.
           —After Andrew Wyeth's "End of the Road" (2005)


    My Family Sees My Empty Hands

    I've nothing to show for my walk
    except the moon's wreckage, what's left
    of its light catching the snow's slow smoke,
    heat from a thaw rubbing against the cold body
    of winter, while I stomp my feet at the door,
    run my hands together, moonlight like frost
    on a corpse, so hard to recover any warmth,
    despite the fire that burns in the hearth.


    Forgive Me

    What is life but fingers placed against blood's rhythm,
    some outward movement, the soul's coming and going
    like a kettle of kestrel that fly up against a ridge
    and back out along its face? So much of this one life
    goes to desire, the blue and orange feathers of our waking.
    Migration is one way, following the ever-blooming, ever-ripening
    path of the sun. Yet so much grief awaits—
    whether we fly north or south, whether we settle ourselves
    in the white-heat that roosts along the Gulf coast
    or continue into the rainforest's dark-green light.
    The sun climbs out of the earth in the east and swims
    across open water, while night's westward stroke tugs us
    into dream. Nothing travels in a straight line. That's why
    the moon returns each month, ascending the circle of its life,
    then disappearing. Forgive me. I don't want anything more
    than this: the song of the goldfinch who comes to eat
    of the cone flower's small dark seeds, its wisdom
    in waiting out winter in one place.


    The Secrets of Baking Soda

    The older we get the more we've learned to accept
    that the body runs, then walks, eats, then sleeps, only
    to wake again—sometimes to passion, sometimes

    to the vague tug of this day's chores: laundry, dishes,
    a yard to mow, bushes to trim, a room to paint.
    After twenty years of marriage, I know the smell

    of your body after you've bathed, the way the pores
    of your skin open like certain flowers in the day's
    first light. But this is like saying I know water seeks

    the lowest point or the vireo gladly accepts the burden
    of its song's notes. Perhaps it's what I haven't learned
    that I love the most: you and your mother talking for hours

    about how to hang curtains; how to remove the stains
    our children bring on their knees; the secrets of baking soda
    and vinegar, flour and the slightest hint of cinnamon.
           —For Virginia Kasamis and Shelly Davis


    What if in the beginning

    it was Adam, not Eve, who ate of the fruit?
    Where then might forgiveness lie? And if
    instead of a serpent, it had been a lamb
    that sauntered forward from behind a clump
    of new grass, the green fresh in her mouth,
    who could have turned away from temptation?
    When at last she nudged his hand, black face
    pushed forward, was it the knowledge
    of what he would do that tasted like ginger
    upon his tongue, long, lingering, the future
    set before him like strands of wool
    made into yarn, Eve's hands moving
    with forgiving ease, knitting a cloak
    to cover the hardness of his guilt, still large
    between his legs, then a hat for his balding head,
    and last a satchel to carry the lamb's heart
    which he cut from her chest
    before roasting her upon the spit?


    Invasive

    The heavy green that hangs in mid-July has fallen
    on us these last few days. Even the stalks of mullein

    and Joe-pye weed sag with its weight. I don't know
    whether I should call this sadness. When a man

    can reach between thick leaves and retrieve a blackberry
    swollen with rain, bloated with the hottest days

    of summer, it's difficult to take him at his word.
    Yet where the rains have settled, purple loosestrife

    bursts, suff ocates others by the dozens, blossoms
    for the dead and dying, for the beauty we can't help but see

    in our own slow destruction.


    A Psalm for My Children

    Lord, there's so much talk of beginning and ending
    when we're stuck right here in the middle.
    A cooper's hawk cries its loud cack-cack-cack-cack
    somewhere to the left of us, crack in the canopy
    letting light fall in as this bird flies below the roof
    of trees, hunger in the basket of its belly. Look
    how it searches for something to feed its hunger,
    how hunger never lets it rest. Must we always take a life
    to feed a life? The first tenet has less to do with suffering
    than sowing and reaping. The spirit of the Lord grows round
    in the bellies of watermelon, ripe and full of sugar-water.
    The taste of the Lord is shiny and sweet, like the brilliant
    red that seeps from the warbler as the cooper's hawk
    tears flesh from its hollow bones. I tell my children
    they do not understand the Lord's ways yet. (I must confess:
    neither do I.) But their love for the warmth of the sun,
    and these long green vines winding their way across the dirt
    of our garden, is enough for now. They ask if the cantaloupe
    is ripe, if we might cut it open as well. I wonder if this
    is thanksgiving I feel, Lord, or regret for having to harvest
    one more thing?


    Our Forgetting

    June light lengthens, pulled like string
    from a ball of twine, or like days
    in the far north, strands of hair so thin

    night doesn't come for months at a time.
    With light that long, the eyes and the soul
    must grow tired, as must the grasses

    and flowers that emerge all at once.
    We are made for motion and rest.
    To be awake for days on end and then

    to sleep, to sleep: it must be like climbing
    down a shaft in the earth, dark crumbling,
    then collapsing, until you find the edge

    of the river that runs far beneath the ground:
    waters undetectable to the eye, felt more
    through the sound they carry than the caress

    they finger over the soft skin on the inside
    of the wrist. It is this kind of sleep
    none can resist: why we disrobe, slide leg-first

    into its current, blackness bearing more
    than our bodies, our forgetting
    of what continues well above our heads.
           —For Barbara Hurd and Stephen Dunn

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Least of These by Todd Davis Copyright © 2010 by Todd Davis. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

I....................7
And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible....................8
A Memory of Heaven....................9
None of This Could Be Metaphor....................10
The Face of Jesus....................11
Stem Cell....................12
Confession....................13
Tequila....................14
Aubade....................15
Craving....................16
Doctrine....................17
Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September....................18
Half in the Sun....................19
Weather Report....................20
My Family Sees My Empty Hands....................21
Forgive Me....................22
The Secrets of Baking Soda....................23
What if in the beginning....................24
Invasive....................25
A Psalm for My Children....................26
Our Forgetting....................27
On the eve of the Iraqi Invasion, my wife says....................30
Jonah Begins to Think like a Prophet....................31
The Fish in the Cage....................32
An Island Mother Speaks....................33
Black Water....................34
Obituary....................35
Veil....................36
Again, at Daybreak....................37
II....................41
Happiness....................44
Like a Thief....................46
Democracy....................47
The Blessing of the Body, Which Is the House of Prayer....................48
Aesthetics....................49
The Rhododendron....................50
Questions for the Artist....................51
The River....................54
The Sunflower....................55
Dryad....................56
Gastronomy....................57
Christmas Eve....................58
Winter Morning....................59
Responsibility....................60
Farm Wives....................61
Note to Walt Whitman....................62
Shibboleth....................63
After It Rained All Night, She Said He Woke Up Dead....................64
Entering the Meadow above Th ree Springs Run....................65
Some Say the Soul Makes the Living Weep....................66
Neither Here Nor There....................67
Why We Don't Die....................68
The Kingdom of God Is like This....................69
The Saints of April....................70
Migration....................72
Accident....................73
The Least of These....................74
Happy for This....................75
Omen....................76
Nicodemus's Complaint....................77
Last Supper....................78
III....................81
April Poem....................82
Turkey Hunting....................83
My Son, in Love for the First Time....................84
Vernal....................86
Theodicy....................87
The World Can Be a Gentle Place....................88
The Night after the Day the Clover Blooms....................89
July Finds the Soul like a Ripe Berry....................90
Puberty....................91
Keeping Secrets....................92
Persephone Dreams of Thomas Hart Benton....................93
Upon Finding Something Worthy of Praise....................94
Field Mouse....................95
A German Farmer Thinks of Spring....................96
Necessity....................97
Far Afield....................98
Consider....................99
Note to My Wife, with Hopes She Won't Need to Read It for Some Time....................100
Now When We Kiss....................101
Barn Swallows....................102
Omnivore....................103
Spared....................104
Cows Running....................105
The Sleep of Pears....................106
Salvage....................107
Matins....................108
Indian Summer....................109
Yellow Light....................110
What I Wanted to Tell the Nurse When She Pricked My Thumb....................111
Solvitur Ambulando....................112
Ananias Lays Hands on Saul....................113
Apology to Crows....................114
Bacchanalian Interlude....................115
House of the World....................116
Golden....................117
Tree of Heaven....................121
Ascension....................123
Acknowledgments....................127

What People are Saying About This

Jim Harrison

Many poets feel that they know the natural world, but Todd Davis has absorbed this world fully into his heart and mind. He is a fine, rare poet. (Jim Harrison, author of Dalva)