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Until All That Was Left Was a Voice

Fear wanted my name sealed within

A question not even my bluest instinctCould unfold. But then the wind began to flutter

The first bright image I heard make the darkness sing.

To think, before this, I felt ready to lose the miracleOf adding a few quiet feathers to the heart.

To think: I trusted that silence was my destiny.

You’ve believed before that your destiny was with silence.

Then a wanting suddenly feathered this bright instinctAlready added to your name, a windy heart

No question will seal or quiet, the bluest flutter.

Nothing can undo the miracle of hearingWhat has yet to unfold. Trust what you began:

Only you can make your darkness sing.

To banish that empty kind of praying, I try

Tilting this pain-invented loudness from my breath.I swear a new season lives there. I hear it humming

With every reason to make the rain into an answer.

Whether I speak or stay silent, I desireThe good promise in each body to continue.

The sky is where I choose to look now.

Don’t forget the sky’s answer inside you,

Each rain-cloud kind of hummingWith breath. Whether tried or tilted,

The right prayer will invent a new reason

Not to banish the good body still living there.You can choose to hear it now, every season,

This emptying of any knowing that promises pain.

I only mention more birds for the music

To soften the hurt of all connection. But shame wouldAim the infinity of my mind at another dead return

Failed by light. Sometimes, too many stilled wings

Rhyme with “never”—my limbs going so numbRemembering what the hunch in my back couldn’t make

Stony or clear. I’m waiting for this to sound like safety…

To be clear and unmoved: your own listening is becoming a softness…

Even when reviving a dead hunch still drowning in blame,You’ve never been known to mention a failure that couldn’t hold

The music of safety. If aimed at infinity, your mind remembers

Some numbed desires will rhyme with a hurt bird’s return—But only to find the hymn for calling back more

Of the banished light. It sounds like many, many wings.

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Geffrey Davis is the author of One Wild Word Away and Night Angler, winner of Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award. Davis teaches at University of Arkansas and The Rainier Writing Workshop.

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