Opening King David

Poems in Conversation with the Psalms

Davis

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274203
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The human experience is an intimate, tough, and, at times, hilarious conversation with what is familiar and what is mystery. Poetry at its best turns this conversation into art and teaches by example how to employ language creatively and courageously--even coyly--in exploring the full range of human response to whatever life may deliver. Certainly the biblical Psalms set the highest of standards in this regard. In Opening King David, Davis takes aim at making contemporary poems in conversation with the Psalms; his personal, cultural, and natural surroundings; and the wonder and mess of his own soul. As a painter with all colors at his disposal, Davis writes with the full spectrum of his available vocabulary, sometimes reaching for the glorious ineffable, at other times bluntly telling it like it--darkly--is. Neither devotional nor inspirational nor religious, these human poems take God seriously and honor our common struggle toward what Saint Paul calls the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

Book Five

Some wandered in desert wastelands.

Psalm 107:4

Good Things

At the Met, hundreds of instruments locked

behind bulletproof glass—Segovia’s

among them—cold as a photograph.

When I get home, Bill will be dropping by

whose life, one year beyond Donna’s slow

dying, has begun to open into what is,

for him, a familiar direction. For years

the road was his destination of choice:

bars, honky-tonks, county fairs; anywhere,

any time, any amount; every now

and then a real music hall, a listening

crowd with sober ears who cared how he voiced

the light, bending twang of his pedal steel.

Just back from the first tour in a decade—

eight shows in eight nights, from Cincinnati

to Atlanta—Bill says he has stories.

So I’m guessing, over coffee we’ll do

a fair bit of laughing, settle into

that crazy sense of knowing why we’re here,

then maybe say a prayer or two before

he returns to an empty apartment

and I flick the toggle on my Blues Junior,

wait for the tubes to begin to glow, and send

the first notes of a new song spinning.

I will measure off the Valley of Succoth.

Psalm 108:7

Lining the Field

To contain the action, delineate

in and out of bounds, the hourly crew

paints with a water-based white paint the well-

plotted, regulation perimeter

of the boys lacrosse field. I watch from this

third floor classroom and think of my mother,

a school girl in British Columbia,

learning the game from an Okanogan

whose ancestors received it as a gift

with one rule of play: play to win

with such vigor as befits

gratitude to the One who is

giver, spectator, and referee—

and he may restore gladness, heal the sick.

From this room, my skybox I call it, I

cannot tell whose cold fingers tie and untie

the string stretched between stakes hammer-driven

in the still frozen corners of the field,

or whose gloves grip the cumbersome machin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Book One
• Book Two
• Book Three
• Book Four
• Book Five
• Notes