The Raven's Book

where presence is denied them
They fling their speech.
    –Emily Dickinson

 

I

 

Are you still there? I didn't know

 

there could be this much room. Such a short word, No,
but how long they've been saying it.

 

They say men tend to head in the direction
of their handedness. So I look for you

 

on the right. It's not much to go on.
But of little, at least, there will never be shortage.

 

I want to tell you all the little wrongs between us,
the ones they don't arrest.

 

If you were here, you'd bend into me,
low as a fountain's stump of water, and whisper

 

Once everyone's dreamed, we will sleep.

 

 

II

 

Do you think there is such a thing as a happy memory?
Aren't the mountains in debt

 

to the valleys? Sometimes I think only sad memories
could truly be happy. They are final in the mind.

 

Consider the ravens, sayeth the lord,
for they neither sow nor reap, they keep nothing in store.

 

For which god feeds them.

 

 

III

Would you say you are getting closer?

 

In China, they say a three-legged raven lives inside the sun:
dawn, dusk, and noon are the names.

 

Whereas a man's legs are two and take sides.

 

I begin to lose track of you. If you are alive
you are looking at the moon

 

and I can trace the isosceles of our seeing.

 

 

IV

 

At first, I searched for your face.

 

Then, after many months, your clothing.
Then, the sudden absence

 

of spider webs and the shining of the dirt,
which are the signs of a human being.

 

Then I waited and continued to wait and made a mess

 

of your things
to be among them.

 

Then spring came, and no bird
resumed its egg.

 

 

V

Do you think there is such a thing as forgetting?

 

Sometimes I think it is the nearest
a thing can come
and not need a name.

 

Doesn't a house remain around us, a real house
for which only
the visible sign is lacking?

 

Beside it, the termites continue the tree.
The ravens continue the rabbit, ravenously.

 

Above it, sky
is like a blackboard

 

written on with erasers.

 

 

A note on the text: "I am fairly in the raven's book." was once a way of saying "I am dying." The sequence was written in honor of Nadezhda Mandelstam's final letter to her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, which he never received. "No bird resumes its egg" was embedded in the letters of Emily Dickinson. For the notion of an invisible home that stretches over vast distances, I am indebted to Rilke. - Christina Davis

 

From Forth A Raven by Christina Davis. Copyright © 2006 by Christina Davis. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.