DAVID DANIEL

Uncle Emmet, Wiser Than God

   (reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press)

The most nearly spherical
And therefore perfect
Of seven brothers
And his beautiful, butcher-wife
Mary, brought forth
No children unto this land,
Which now is water.
They seemed to know
The dam would come
And all return to darkness,
That God would rest from then on
And say of Friendship, Texas,
I did what I could do.

Emmet laughed as they walked
Into their fields, as the water
Rose to their heads,
As Mary nuzzled his stone-smelling neck,
And he said of Friendship, Texas,
It never had a chance,
Which they'd known
Since tasting the wheat
In the body of Christ,
Since Mary first spilt open a rabbit
And touched her fingers to her tongue—
So decided not to fight their destiny,
The dam's brown water of forgetting,
But rather to take it in,
To swell and dissolve like seeds,
To wander into the heart
Of that more perfect solitude:
And so, hand in hand, and slow, they did.