Even if that is so, there will remain

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—Haven’t you always thought your life

Was a calculated risk, your bushels

Of wheat, your baskets of bread,

The dead not sprouting up anytime

Soon, and what would you say if you saw one?

—Or the day you abandoned your search

For the missing word, was, or was it

Were, when you thought nothing quite

Adds up to thrush, and could you ever

Really say non ne dubito, ne sono certo?

—Or that other day you asked about how

To learn to doubt, since it can’t be taught,

No high-wire act of faith, the b, never silent

In itself, never wavers in doubt, so simple, you

Said, this world, and so complicated, you said, the next.

language faith

Edward Mayes

Edward Mayes is the author of five books of poetry including Works and Days (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize for Poetry, and First Language (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), winner of the Juniper Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review , The Best American Poetry , The Gettysburg Review , Harvard Review , The Kenyon Review , The Massachusetts Review , The New Yorker , The Southern Review , and Poetry , among others. He is also the coauthor, with his wife Frances Mayes, of three books about Tuscany: In Tuscany (Broadway Books, 2000), Bringing Tuscany Home (Broadway Books, 2004), and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2012). Mayes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and both the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He previously served as the director of the creative writing program at Santa Clara University. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Cortona, Italy. Photo by Steven Rothfeld