Unlike a Horse

What light plays in the brain

is not all light. What sound,

what scent-whatever

we call knowledge is

partial, imprecise. This, too,

and every pass at saying so,

in spite of all sincerity.

Yet what persists in the brain,

in spite of the brain's lot,

is a sense of the whole

inhering somehow, such that

light remains light and, regardless

of sincerity, what is conceived

equine expires equine.

True, madness might insist

differently, or that incendiary

dream of apocalypse

visited always elsewhere

upon some other with inscrutable

clarity of sequence, displacing

all sincerity by its own.

But reality is universal,

and we do not matter to it

unless we are intended,

the effort of a care sincerely

unlike a horse, or a brain,

or the new day's light reflecting

carelessly between us.

BRAD DAVIS

* Brad Davis has verse appearing in Image and The Paris Review.

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2001
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