Theology

Abstract

Theology Christopher Nelson (bio) said the blade to the lamb we’re in this together said the garden to the god when do we have a say said the lamb in return yes but only one of us is an exit said the poet to the moon none or few but you & you O you said the god to the garden I give you locusts and you give me your yearning said the moon in reply why said the sayer to the said we bled with a pity unique to men said the men in chorus know you not the principle of the knot the one that binds & the one that gives said the garden to the man without me you’re just another animal said the animal to the god we know you like the smell of water said the water the only word, house & seed of all others, the unspliced root the mother even of god who set down the gavel & astrolabe to try her hand at gardening to be green again after so much silence so much noise in the code [End Page 76] Christopher Nelson CHRISTOPHER NELSON is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press 2021) and three chapbooks, including Blue House, which earned him a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. He is the founder and editor of Green Linden Press and the journal Under a Warm Green Linden. In tracing the word “fairy” backward through time, we find that it has for centuries suggested the possibility that the world that meets the eye isn’t the whole world, that beneath the apparent there is the Other: other truths, other beings, other stories. Go back far enough and this inherent strangeness, this Other, becomes synonymous with the very act of speaking, as if the first and ultimate Other wasn’t God or death but the very self we know yet don’t exactly know. In writing, I try to keep this mystery close, to let it guide the pen. Copyright © 2023 Wayne State University Press