Jon Davis
Wallace Stevens Returns as Poet Laureate of Sacramento
The city council wants a project description.
I propose an assignation of zander,
a consanguineous gathering of prompts
by the downtown library. I have chosen
to enjamb the finches careering
past junipers, the failing light
on an assembly of doves. I scan
the ragged meter of sycamore,
address the congeries of bougainvillea,
the synathroesmus of blackbirds
in the eucalyptus. Soon, I will sonnet
the mayor's incarceration,
villanelle the mega mall's grand opening.
Meanwhile, poetry gathers like silt in a delta,
like a ribbon of foam at river's edge.
It is everywhere in this country
of rice paddies and factory vegetables,
of suburban enclaves and walkers of dogs.
How easily they embrace the tropes
of their illumination. But here is my charge:
to call everyone to the ragged edge of the poem,
to send everyone home with a pennant or charm.
Wallace Stevens Visits the Walmart Wine Aisle
Nothing here to tempt the tempered palate.
Burdened by vineyards and varietals,
She stalks the dreary aisles. Taste
Narrows pleasure and widens resolve, she thinks.
(Her father’s words inked behind her eyes.)
The regulars fill carts with fizz and foam,
The grandiloquent temptations quick to hand.
A surety calms her. She’ll go without
Rather than risk her trenchant tongue,
Her legacy of rarefaction. While the credulous
March past vineyard sophists with their grandiose
Assertions, she declines this simulacrum.
This horde of feted consumers--
A pride of certitude and pluck. Her father
Again: The palate sated by the proximate
Is quickly spoiled for the difficult and nuanced.
The coarse vat trundled to market too soon;
The mediocrity vaunted in the lachrymose
Aisles. She skirts the sovereign dullards
With their checklists, their cornucopiac carts.
They’ll lounge later by above-grounds
And inflatable spas. She’ll mount instead
A burgundy aspic, sunder it with a silver spoon.
A Vesuvius of wants yields a Pompeii of dreads.
Her father again, an earnest whisper in her ear.
Wallace Stevens Scans the Headlines
Here, the peonies make of florid a diminutive.
Though a siege of green-gold beetles
Already tumbles across fervid petals.
Elsewhere, ministrations, misperceived attentions–
A woman wakes in a caul of flame.
It seems there was a time when we were kind
And lovely in the littoral shallows,
Knee-deep and grateful for sand and shells.
Sea and sky endless, welcoming. We smiled
In the gravity of our innocence, gathered creatures
In a bucket. But we were already made
Otherwise in shadows, shadowed
By glint and scowl, by muffled spats
In the anteroom. An intimate terror
At breakfast, clatter of silver and China.
Already made, though neighbors will speak
Of a joyful child, of crayons and sequins.
All the tools of deception arrayed.
Meanwhile, the fenestrated peonies–
The pleasant fragrance turning,
There among the detumescent petals
And green-gold beetles,
Into an oblivion of desire–
A ravishment in rankest summer heat.
Jon Davis, author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections, is currently at work on Wallace Stevens on the Moon, which will be published by 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 from the Academy of American Poets, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught creative writing and literature for thirty years, twenty-eight of them at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA, which he directed until his retirement in 2018
In January of 2024, Davis and poet/guitarist Greg Glazner formed the band Clap the Houses Dark. Their first album, which mixes poetic language with complex rock compositions, is streaming on all major platforms. The New Mexico Music Awards chose the song “Over the Transom” as one of five finalists for the 2025 Indie Rock song of the year.
Banner Art:
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peonies, c.1920, (MET, 1993.339), Wikimedia Commons
