Its sorrows fit on the head of a pin little street its chore-doers
visible through open doors back courtyards opening
the world there unfolds, inheres and makes true
the sound of it anyway the milkmaid gone to market the lady
with her list of orders bow your head say you’re sorry into it
the holy person evaporated into air brick on brick
the solarium quiet young marble-throwers bent to tasks
like counting like spelling their names or learning Latin
who’s to say where knowledge becomes underhue tests itself
and fades its fine plain-weave linen aglow the street
containing umber a little chalk and lead white the difference
between this and a sermon the level of doubt
the bent figures their pentimento telling us
prayer is one of many ways to work and love like regret
is azurite part cream part lead tin-yellow
Carol Ann Davis is the author of the poetry collections Psalm (Tupelo Press, 2007) and Atlas Hour (Tupelo, 2011) and a forthcoming essay collection, The Nail in the Tree: On Art, Violence, and Parenting (Tupelo, 2019). Her work has been published in The Georgia Review, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. An NEA fellow and finalist for a National Magazine Award, she is professor of English at Fairfield University, where she is founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that brings writing workshops to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence. She lives in Newtown, Connecticut. (updated 4/2019)