Do you think I don’t know that when I say Lord
I might be singing into the silo where nothing is stored,
where it is written low lights were confused
by skyward light and flew its bodies
as birds against walls?
Well, everyone thrashes
against a wall
in this life.
I don’t know what I mean,
but I mean it. I don’t know what to want,
but I want it. And when I say God
it’s because no one can know it—not ever,
not at all—. It’s a wall.
And it drops to the floor as I fall.
Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review have published her poems. She served as a 2016 judge for the National Book Award in Poetry. Her next book, If You Have To Go, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2018. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program at the University of California, Riverside. Ford's fourth book, If You Have to Go, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press this August.
