JESSE K. BUTLER is a poet based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He recently won third place in the Kierkegaard Poetry Competition, judged by Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano. His poems have been published in many different journals, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Blue Unicorn, Dappled Things, THINK, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. His first book, The Living Law, was published this year by Darkly Bright Press.
The City of Letters
And Caleb drove out from there the three sons of Anak, Sheshai and Ahiman and Talmai, the descendants of Anak. And he went up from there against the inhabitants of Debir; now the name of Debir formerly was Kiriath-sepher. —Joshua 15
I
There’s Caleb, stomping his late way to the mountain.
His mind’s an immediacy each experience folds into.
He knows what he wants. Eighty-five years young and counting,
he’s a sagging skinsack filled with unsoftened sinew.
When he was flung out into the desert, he couldn’t
help but feel his strength was seeping out in the sand.
But he sharpened his will. His eyes would scan and blueprint
stray boulders as siege machinery, ready to his hand.
Now he’s here to slaughter giants, until their soupy blood
swamps the foothills and their cavernous skulls are crowned
in curses. His world is warm like the closed fist of God.
His aim strikes home, but it bends the long way around.
II
Othniel founded the City of Letters
on the ashes left of the City of Letters—
rattled clear the scarred walls of the fortress,
restacked the pyramid of debtors on debtors.
Like any city it started with love
and slaughter. Nothing could stop his hand
until Caleb’s daughter was claimed as his wife.
She came complaining about the parched land.
But that was then. Imperfection drives
the founder to filter out the flaw.
He’s building an industry of scribes,
layering law on law on law.
III
The desert-dry earth
surrounds her here, but
still Achsah’s content.
Life blooms in her reach—
brimming with blessings,
bubbling, bottomless—
she tends to the fountain
that’s gathering in
to swell and sing
to the thirsty land—
the upper spring
and
the lower spring.
It grows to her hand,
nascent, nourishing.
Stony-eyed, her men
only see the mountain.
How to show them this—
the gurgling essence,
the source, around which
their will is bent?
Listen—far underfoot
it breaks into birth.
IV
The chaos Othniel came to was awful
when the city called him back as judge.
Who else would determine what was lawful
or wasn’t, when most things tip on the edge?
Everyone was shouting. He had to rid them
of the morass of stories, endlessly shifting,
the graves of giants, the murkiness hidden
beneath the foundation stones of the city.
Now the work of it shrivels his margins. There’s something
special dancing past reach, about to disappear.
He’s lost in his own streets, remembering
how he used to remember why he was here.
V
The desert dragged on. But what dreams it let Caleb have!
He’d see the mountain swarming thick with giants
until their milling weight popped it concave.
They’d drop down, waist-deep in their confusion, packed dense
in that sudden indent, while Caleb galloped up
to gut their accessible flanks. Slumped in that abyss,
they’d die like Nimrod—broken, a bellowing heap.
It’s like that, though. You climb till hope collapses
with its own weight. What Caleb could see at forty
was desert, not which way the horizon bent.
Each morning when he woke he woke up ready
to make another inside-out ascent.
JESSE K BUTLER is a poet based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He recently won third place in the Kierkegaard Poetry Competition, judged by Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano. His poems have been published in many different journals, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Blue Unicorn, Dappled Things, THINK, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. His first book, The Living Law, was published this year by Darkly Bright Press.