Poem of the Week | July 15, 2024

“Against Deliverance” by Jon Davis is our Poem of the Week.

Jon Davis is the author of, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (2021) and Fearless Now and Nameless (forthcoming in 2025), both from Grid Books. Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught creative writing for 30 years, including 28 at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he co-founded both the BFA and MFA programs. jondavispoet.com

Against Deliverance

My mother believed in nothing and to nothing was delivered.
     While firebirds circled the chimney.
While I drove from exit to exit, eastern Pennsylvania and nowhere to sleep.
     To sell a handful of books to the citizens of Nashville, I’d driven.
To see Rancid and my nephew and return.
     Driving was battering lights, darkness and fear.
Driving was twenty feet of road and music: “Lord, I’m going uptown.”
     I’d been to Nashville and was returning.
When the call came, I could not answer.
     The last time I’d visited she said she’d read the online stories.
The last time I’d visited she said she now knew what I’d tried to tell her.
     I thought of him standing beside the bed, this “friend of the family.”
But he never touched my boys, she’d said, digging into the my.
     My mother believed in nothing and to nothing was delivered.
While I drove through Pennsylvania near midnight without a place to sleep.
     The message said, She’s passed.
While firebirds circled the chimney.
     Gone as she wanted to be gone.
Despite everything or because of it.
     Four sons dead and yet she’d continued.
When I finally slept it was a dreamless sleep.
     Fine then, I thought, waking to a ceiling washed by parking lot lights. Just go.
 

Author’s Note

In 2022, I thought I had finished a book of poetry. Then, without warning, new poems started pouring out, driven by the deaths of my partner’s ex-husband, two favorite uncles, my mother—all of whom vanished, leaving complicated, unfinished stories hanging in the air. The result was a different manuscript entirely. Occasionally, I have no memory of writing a poem. This is one of those poems. I have no idea where the opening line came from. Nor do I know why that opening led to my recounting the days before her death. Or why it leads to the bitter ending.