Daniel DeVaughn

Universal Desire

Sometimes I find myself lingering in the freezer aisles
at the wholesale grocery (the one that’s employee-owned) and realize
I’ve been listening for what is now a long time
to the dyad they sing, the tall, coffin-like cases displaying
bags of corn, Brussels, and onion rings, their bright
insides the vegetable medleys said to represent
whole cultures, regions of the inexhaustible world.
I guess my desire for mystery will never die, but go on
staring from the other side, a dark reflection in glass
gone blurry with frost and fingerprints. Silence,
then the condensers kick on and moan like faceless angels. 

I used to think this need to believe I had gotten the earth
wrong, to believe in a beauty hidden but still babbling
like voices behind a door locked forever, was
special to me, grown wild from the garden of my youth,
which was not a garden at all but undeveloped tracts
of hardwood forest, a creek whispering under it, the water
pouring down from the columned porch of a new-build box
at the top of the hill—I thought, and still like to think.
But I had friends there too, one whose father was the editor-
in-chief of a magazine all about beauty, a man who,
back then, my mother’s mother might have called sweet.

Once, while the friend and I played horse on the hot
plain of his driveway, I heard two voices rising,
an argument inside the house, which carried out to the lawn,
where my friend’s mother, barefoot, cried bitterly, a hand
over her face, the other arm around her breast,
something I thought adults outgrew,
or were not allowed to do. I couldn’t believe what that
house had produced. My friend turned, shot, and sunk
a perfect three. There is a power that moves in material
things, and it isn’t the spirit. On my walk home
through the wood I found a dense and perfect nest

in the baking pine-straw, a robin’s I guessed, but saw
no egg, no sky-blue window of shell. It’s been a long time
since I’ve heard cicadas, that sound that is now its own
cliché and near-mythology, because it’s the sound of being
in the middle of things, an unseen chorus turning like a wheel
that stays, and, under which, I waited, another body
lost in the understory. In the middle of what? Resin
shined on the pine bark. The thin creek breathed
its glossy pictures and I took a drink. Something like glory,
the astonishment of being at all, and beyond this,
like riding the universal desire, most you,

most I, a child’s ball turning in the froth
but shining, staying near. Any kid knows
that beauty is part of the scene, or should be. Fireflies,
seasons, water you can drink. What we have lost
will go on changing, but I still want to be changed, to carry
paradise into the wider or narrower aisles. I held
the nest over the water, then watched as it fell from the moment
and into this future. There is no other. This hum, and this
blinding light, where I have grown hungrier. When I find
what I am looking for, I will open the door.

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Daniel DeVaughn is the Poetry Editor at American Literary Review, and has received support from the University of Oregon, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. His poetry film collaborations with Non Films have received awards at numerous festivals in the United States and in Europe, and his poems appear or are forthcoming in Image Journal, Poets.org, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology vol. X: Alabama and elsewhere.