Geffrey Davis

Self-Portrait with Stingers

Sometimes I question the blessing of each window
opened to pain’s awkward but certain
approach, of rewriting my name in tenderness

without converting this body to smoke.    The first hit:
I watched what I didn’t know then
to be a yellowjacket alight in my pre-school palm

as instinct curled fingers around the pleasant
tickle of six whispery legs within my grasp…
Years later, I nearly lost an eye for trying my own

foolish hand at defending. After the dog had nosed the beehive
tucked in rosebushes and came out a yelping
twisting thing, I took up arms—I didn’t see

the hit coming: not through the veil of youth;
not while hurling at the hive any branch I could raise;
and not when, out of everything to launch but anger,

I belly crawled beneath the thick buzz of danger
in the air. What made me stand the moment I’d gained
a misfired branch, lifting the enemy of my head

with its too-few memories and brown irises
into a cloud of sharp answers?    Years later, by luck, I got
stung by what I didn’t know could’ve been hundreds

of poisonous refusals to me, a boy-sized monster,
treading on home—I didn’t see the hit coming:
not while laboring to clear the field with my father,

whom even then I loved as terribly as I dreaded
his growing and not-yet-named discontent; not when
shoulder to sweaty shoulder with him in the uneasy

togetherness of that difficult work; not until I
trampled the belonging below and minor lightning
struck inside my pantleg, jolting me into the funniest

unfunny jig of my life. I can still feel it:
my father’s right-there face at the odd cusp of a laugh,
but for the awful noise ruining with suffering

what was otherwise a quiet and beautiful boy. Years later,
as luck would have it, I got stung once more
by what could’ve been a different multitude

of murderous responses to me, this monster-
sized man, prodding at home—I didn’t see the hit coming:
not while prepping the path to paint

a neglected country cottage; not while teetering on my ladder
to reach with paintbrush the final desiccated feet
of siding, which just so happened to hide something else’s

fiercely guarded safety, a secret my body was
the first to learn when that lightning struck again
my back, the can I dropped adding its glossy contents

to the hard ground under what good light remained.    That
was the last sting I remember. Sometimes I forget
how steadily that venomous trouble would find me—season

after season, until it suddenly stopped. Sometimes I fear
only this papery blockage keeping that old universe at bay,
its litany of barbs carried my way on thin, elaborate wings.

Longing, We Say

-for S

Because isn’t it enough to just hold one voice,
I placed the raw wonder of my ear
beneath a friend’s ruined marriage, its sudden long lack.

(Tears that left her loveliness
fed the yard rioting at her feet.)

So when a lone robin perched near
and, with last light, set its own ragged notes of grief
to cutting the warm air around us, I
had nothing but hope for that bird.

(My eyes returned to my friend’s eyes,
my hand to the hard wind at her back.)

If the world is a sacred song, fractured
by desire’s difficult half-names, loneliness
heightened with each lucid yearning… Let us hold just one voice.

Geffrey Davis is the author of three books of poems, most recently One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024). His second collection, Night Angler, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and his debut, Revising the Storm, was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Davis currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches fulltime with the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation. Raised by the Pacific Northwest, he also serves as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review and is a core faculty member of The Rainier Writing Workshop.