Bio Note

Borne past brick 
and night-squall,
collared and frisked, 

humdrumming 
in the boom.
Credentialed by dawn 

and to dawn indentured. 
Briefly handsome
in the squalor, squalid

where hope met hoped-for.
Hopped-up. Hoveled. 
Tenured. Muddled. 

Tonsured by events, 
spraddled and pratfallen, 
labile in midlife, 

fallow in the mudstruck eve.
Leavened by sorrow. 
Half-grit, half-grimace.

Joy but a glance.
Matriculating still, 
long in the matrix

of gut and glyph.
Etched by circumstance,
this stint on Earth—

ξ

The Gift

It begins back before memory, begins in stories told and heard, of gravelpit, hog farm, of hogs shifting in ramshackle enclosures, storm doors and logs and skids, scavenged and stacked and tied together to trap the hungers inside, to keep them in the slop and stagger, huffing and grunting there, those shadows patrolling the nights, great breathings chuffing inside the marrow pit. 

It begins with the hogs, though he never saw the hogs, not with eyes that see and name and remember, not with eyes that knew “hog” and “slop” and “chuffing.” 

It begins there, as it must, where he was carved from oblivion, hollowed out and filled again in darkness and mud, in stomp and roll, in wild grunting and slaughter. 

This part he was innocent of. This part was done, not chosen. This part he would suffer and slog through. 

And had it been a field of lambs instead? Then, lamblike, he'd be leaping. But he was given muddle and plod, the blind belly-push, the wriggle and flop. Given hoglight. Bristle and grist. Bucketclang, snorting, and the plunging darkness.

ξ

Jon Davis is the author of five poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry, including An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat, Improbable Creatures, and, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City, all from Grid Books. He was co-translator, with the author, of Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces. Davis has received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, the Peter I.B. Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and two National Endowment for the Arts’ poetry fellowships. He was the city of Santa Fe’s fourth Poet Laureate and taught for 28 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018.