First Thoughts about God after Spying
a Speckled Trout Eat a Green Drake

Todd Davis

A cloud floats in a pool that turns like a slow clock,
helping these insects slide from birthing shucks.                                  *Duns roil the surface, twitch and flutter,
a newborn or paralytic who believes
he can rise and walk again, if only the wind
would command him.                                  *Halos drift around red and blue spots
that star the sides of trout, flares
in rushing water like tongues
of flame.                                  *Heron loves the river cast in green, erratic light
broken over the sycamore’s body
that translates these watery scriptures
into parables of branch-shadow.                                  *A fish wrings its tail, flings itself
toward the molting sky, mouth open
to a psalm of snared flies.                                  *More than half the world is covered by water,
yet most of us are afraid of drowning.
                                      For Ron Rash

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Todd Davis is the author of six books of poetry, including Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, and the forthcoming Native Species, all from Michigan State University Press. He is professor of English and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Image

Number 98 / Fall 2018

Seattle, Washington

Center for Religious Humanism
Seattle Pacific University

Editor in Chief
James K.A. Smith

Poetry Editor
Shane McCrae

Founding Editor
Gregory Wolfe

Image was founded in 1989 to demonstrate the continued vitality and diversity of contemporary art and literature that engage with the religious traditions of Western culture. Now one of the leading literary journals published in English, it is read all over the world—and forms the nexus of a warm and active community.

We believe that the great art that has emerged from these faith traditions is dramatic, not didactic—incarnational, not abstract. And so our focus has been on works of imagination that embody a spiritual struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. In our pages the larger questions of existence intersect with what the poet Albert Goldbarth calls the “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” of our everyday lives. Learn more at imagejournal.org

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