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.