In the Kingdom of the Ditch

Todd Davis teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. He has authored and edited thirteen books.

• Contents I. Taxonomy Perspective A Consideration of the Word “Home” Consciousness: An Assay Dona Nobis Pacem Seeing Th ings The Consolation of Wind Limbo Deer Dreaming Me Imago Dei Midrash A Mennonite in the Garden Fishing for Large Mouth in a Strip-Mining Reclamation Pond near Lloydsville, Pennsylvania What Lives in the Wake of Our Sleep Two Sounds after an October Storm Resurrection: A Field Note Morning Poem The Knowledge of the Lord The Gospel of Beauty Brushwolf Vigil Letter to Dave B. with May’s Insatiable Hunger Tagging Along Upon Looking Down onto the Top of Your Head Where the Hair Has Gone White Atrial Fibrillation What We Do while We’re Dying Begging Bowl Nurse Log Thinking of Li Po while Fishing the Little J What I Told My Sons aft er My Father Died II. Thoreau Casts a Line in the Merrimack Thoreau Hears the Last Warbler at the End of September Dreaming the Dark Smell of Bear Thoreau Considers a Stone Emptying the Bedpan Give Us Th is Day Psalm Written the Last Week of December Thoreau Dreams of Margaret Fuller Three Days after Her Death In the Clear-cut The Virtues of Indolence Offering, as One Example, the Satisfaction of the Bee Thoreau Surveys the Ice In the Kingdom of the Ditch Heaven Come Flying Thoreau, in Death Consecrated III. Not Writing, Then Writing Again Hermetic Hawks Flying When the Body Is Absent Coal Three Songs for Flannery O’Connor Theophany Ordinary Time Spring Melt The Sound of Sunlight Letter to Dave B. from the Karen Noonan Center on the Chesapeake Bay Last of the Sea Missing Boy Apophatic Most of What Is Written Is Simply Grief Heliotropic The Poet Stumbles upon a Buddha in Gamelands 158 above Tipton, Pennsylvania Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love Deposition Perigee Somnambulance Transfiguration Last Bones of Winter Umbilical Poem on the Anniversary of My Father’s Diagnosis with Pancreatic Cancer A Prayer for My Sons, after a Line of Reported Conversation by the Poet William Blake to a Child Seated Next to Him at a Dinner Party Meditation on Hunger at 2 a.m. I’ll Catch You Up Acknowledgments About the Author

“Nouns and verbs have dreams and shadows, as well as their own irreducible essence, and they spill here from the hands of a master. These poems are constructed of a hard and durable majesty that possesses the deepest and most notable sentiments while slipping free always of the damning residue of sentimentality. To say that there is wisdom and beauty in these poems is like saying that fire is hot or that food, or love, is good. On every page, In the Kingdom of the Ditch reminds us that life amazes.”—Rick Bass, author of The Lives of Rocks and The Wild Marsh