Enterpe: Zophar
Chris Ellery
August 23, 2021
Et unus est magister vester. Christus.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
In no particular order, my five best ways
to cure the blues: hold a baby, pray,
make love. That’s three. The fourth is tear your clothes
then sit on the ground with a few of your friends and indulge
in a little rhetoric. But let the rhetorician
understand the risk of speech; blasphemies
ooze from the forked tongue of good intentions.
So often silence is the wisest mode
of argument, uplifting, healing where
dialectics or polemics wound.
Work hard—that’s fifth. Wash, rake, serve, make something.
A sixth, if there can be that many on
a list of five, would be to sing. Let’s say
that singing is implied in numbers four
and five. It is no stretch to claim it’s both
a kind of rhetoric and work. To sing?
Of what? Of babies, God, the young and old
in love. That is, express the pain and joy
of life and living. Sometimes, as in this song,
I sing of singing, and I like to say
that every song is metasong.
I cannot claim that any songs of mine
have forked the lightning, flared from nothingness
to dazzle primal and uncomprehending dark.
Like everyone down in the dust, stricken by love,
which costs so much, I grope for syntax
and mangle syllogisms. Bear this in mind,
whoever reads this book. Verily,
only One is wise. Therefore, I offer in advance
my seven rams and seven bulls. Yet even
if every line and rhyme be born of blindness
down in the deepest pit of my desire,
I still believe my making holy work.
It is the darkest night that best reveals
the lightning and the stars.
Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award.