West Virginia Nocturne
- West Virginia Nocturne
One grief, all evening—: I've stumbledupon another animal merely being itself and still cuffing me to grace.
This time a bumblebee, black and staggeredabove some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop at what I think is dying
to deny loneliness one more triumph,I see instead a thing drunk with discovery—the bee entangled
with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossomgathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly I receive the cold curves and severe angles
from this morning's difficult dreamsabout faith:—certain as light, arriving; certain as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.
How many strokes of undivided wonderwill have me cross the next border, my hands emptied of questions? [End Page 118]
Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. His honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have been published in Massachusetts Review, New York Times Magazine, and Ploughshares, among other places. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches at the University of Arkansas.
