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I found one of the survey stakes that mark the boundaries of our property. A 30” steel rod driven into the earth, with a brass cap just level with the ground. The cap had some numbers and a pair of letters on it. Likely a date and the initials of a surveyor. A human being had—with perhaps a tripod and a glass, a compass, a plumb—identified a particular place. And marked it.
I think of Samuel's Ebenezer and of Abram's altars east of Bethel. I think of names and places and dates written in a book. I think of that book read and read again, gone back to and measured from, having become a fixed place of its own.
These poems were not written to go together. But I'm happy with how they sit together on the Group W bench, unequally guilty of being “about” the Bible. Hardly instructive, I'll be happy if they strike the reader as poems by a guy who is still baffled by the Bible after all these years of living with it.
J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, his brother, and a dog. Poems in The Denver Quarterly, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere. Chapbooks Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023) and More of How to Read the Bible (above/ground press, 2025). Full-length ms in circulation.
