Three Poems by David Wright
Learning to Venerate
At first, he trimmed bonzai trees,
then made mandalas, dream catchers.
For a while he cultivated a small garden
of sand with a tiny wooden rake.
For nearly two years he painted
rocks until they resembled faces
or churches, waiting to see
what the stone would become.
From native clay, he learned
to throw pots, glazed in a fire
he’d made of hand-hewn wood
torn from old Amish barns.
All these left him far off,
a tiny paper boat gone over the falls,
little origami icon of himself
in an eddy, caught in tree roots
thick and benevolent as any human arms.
The Gordian Poet Tangles with God
In a stone hut quite near the Gordian
ruins, a poet twists small spheres of string.
After naps he believes he’s Gordias,
tucking loose ends away, deftly hiding
double knots, clove-hitches, little nooses
deep in the woven core. Nights he becomes
Alexander, weeps over his losses
and victories alike. Always he hums
in the Phrygian mode. He is aware
the scale is no more Greek than his own blood
but he likes the holy semi-tones. Fair
game for jazz or liturgy, the sounds flood
the room. When the clouds at a touch turn gold,
he knifes the cords he has tightened and laughs
at how quickly they loosen. When God rolled
the world into a knotted mess, he too laughed
and felt his throat buzz with song. When he splits
it clean through the center, each severed strand
will fly, free nerve of creation. Catch it between fingers.
Splice this end with others. Wind a tangled world,
threaded (and tethered) with song.
The Actuary Considers the Risk
In the unlikely event of redemption,
(the intricate tables predicting otherwise)
his somber toned Baptist grandma
has told him he should cut his hair,
should make better use of his gifts
for words and numbers, maybe preach
or raise funds for the kingdom,
which he tells her is like a mustard seed,
a tiny kernel already too much at risk --
a flash flood, a burrowing dog, the scuff
of a loafer could dislodge God’s entire future,
the odds against cultivation being as high
as the chances his children will always love
the precise way he flings them into the air
at bedtime, and this, he knows, has happened,
every night for three years. To clutch his palm
around the hollow of an offsetting hope,
to seize such a seed proves a more supreme
risk than he’s willing to take, needing, as he does,
open hands to claim whatever graces fall his way.
David Wright’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely online and in print, in such places as The New Pantagruel, Mars Hill Review,
Books and Culture, and The Christian Century, among others. His latest collection of poems is A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia, 2003).
Copyright © David Wright. All rights reserved.
This page was published November 2004.
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