Purity
"Stir the Waters" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
By Patricia Davis
His neighbors, even their children, sitting
in the warmth of afternoon, giggled
no, guffawed at the monstrosity that rose up
in his yard. Room after room,
stall after stall. What have you
built, Noah?
What did it cost?
When the floodwaters drained
there was nothing
but the dead and an odor
that made Noah tremble.
Noah waited for the earth
to harden—waited until the animals
could step out on the ground
without sinking.
Bushes grew up slowly.
Noah built a new house.
Tracks laced the mud—raccoon,
possum—and each morning
Noah heard birdsong.
Everything that breathed, he knew,
attested to his faith. His obedience.
His skill. Noah saw in dreams
the neighbor children who once poked at ants
by his door. Awake he saw them, too,
unseeing, faces under a skein
of water, narrow shoulders or foreheads—
he heard them—bumping the ark’s sides.
In the birds’ dawn clatter he heard their laughter.
Their question soft—like a minnow
at the tip of a foot: What have you built?
What did it cost?
Patricia Davis’ poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Image, Third Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salt Hill, Crab Creek Review, Kestrel, and other journals. She was a Lannan Fellow at American University, where she earned her MFA, and she is translations editor for the literary journal Poet Lore. She lives in the Washington, DC area, where she works in human rights advocacy.
JoAnneh Nagler is the author of Stay with Me, Wisconsin (Coyote Point Press), Naked Marriage (Skyhorse Publishing); How to Be an Artist Without Losing Your Mind, Your Shirt, or Your Creative Compass (W.W. Norton); and The Debt-Free Spending Plan (HarperCollins), two of which were Amazon Top-100 titles. Her books have been featured in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, Medium.com, etc., as well as many journals, including New Haven Review, The Brussels Review, Persephone, Glimmer Train and more. She is a reader for Ploughshares, and her work has been supported by The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program. www.AnArtistryLife.com.
