August 8, 2026 · 3:57 pm

The Meaning Between the Images: Ethel Mortenson Davis and the Poetrics of Juxtaposition

I suppose I shouldn’t be writing essays about Ethel Mortenson Davis’s poetry.  After all, she’s been my wife for close to 59 years now.  But what I’ve noticed over the years is that too many people, though obviously not everyone, sees a poem of hers and feels a certain spark of delight at the image it sparks in their head.

A short poem she just wrote (so many of her poems are short) brought that to the front of my thoughts:

Pollen-Sacs

A frenzied flock of thrushes,

thin and desperately looking for food,

left us worried and wondering.

A bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs

attached to his legs

struggles to fly homeward—your eyes flash.

Like so much of her poetry, you can read this poem, or better yet, listen to Ethel read it out loud, and you can see the two images:  The starving flock of thrushes and the bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs.  But the question is, what is in the poem beyond the images?

Years ago, even before we were first married in Grand Junction, Colorado, I learned to distrust my first reaction to both her poetry and her art.  What you see is inevitably there, but if you leave what’s there at that, you probably are reacting to what’s there rather than understanding the depth of what’s there and the meaning.

In this particular poem, it’s easy to read the first stanza, see that it is about thrushes frenzied in their desperate search for food, go to the second stanza and see the word “struggles” and assume that it is a poem about creatures that are struggling, maybe from the Canadian or western U.S. wildfires so prominent in the world today.

Certainly, there is a layer in the poem that suggest that global climate change might be affecting the thrushes who are in a state where they are desperately looking for food, but pollen sacs are larvae food, providing essential protein, fats, and vitamins that baby bees need to grow.  A bumble bee struggling to carry two of them attached to his legs is not struggling in the sense the frenzied flock of thrushes are.  The bee has collected abundance and are struggling to get what it has gathered of richness found inside flowers it has visited home.

Another element in the poem is that the pollen in the pollen sacs is essential to life on the planet earth since, as the bee flies from flower to flower, the pollen brushes off on the next flower, helping with the pollination process that is necessary to so much food production around the world as well as the diversity of plant-life that in turn feeds into the diversity of insects and animal-life that keep the entire natural world vibrant.

Therefore, the poem is constructed of a parallelism, one image juxtaposed with another.  This creates a complexity of meanings that, admittedly, demands some understanding of science but creates an even deeper level of poetic meaning, exploring all kinds of issues overwhelming our current world.

Therefore, the poem does contain an implied warning.  The thrushes desperate for food leave us wondering why they are desperate?  What has caused that in a world that flows from the bee as part of the chain of events that creates diversity and. even throughout so much of history, fecundity in the natural world?  Are they migrants from wildfire or severe drought or some other disaster?  The poem doesn’t give us a clue.  It just gives us the image of a fact.

But it also gives us a lesson about bees and the larger importance of diversity in a time when the idea of protecting diversity found in either the natural world or human populations is under attack. 

The bee with pollen sacs so heavy that it struggles to make it home causes your eyes to flash.  The bee is a symbol of hope.  It is flying home to feed the larvae that is going to propagate the hive into the next generation.

That hope is contrasted with the desperate flock of thrushes.

What looks like a simple image or even set of images is not always simple, especially in poetry and art, especially Ethel’s poetry and art.

The Chinese Tradition of Poetry

At the heart of what Ethel tries to do in so much of her poetry does flow from two major sources:  the major one is the traditional Chinese tradition of poetry where concrete images, juxtaposition, suggestion, and meaning are generated through the relationship between images.  There needs to be an intuitive leap by the reader to take the images, juxtaposition(s), and suggestions presented by the poem to discover the meaning of the poem. 

In this sense, the aesthetic convergence of a poem, or even a work of art, can be much more interesting, and an act of discovery, as direct influence.  In Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica”, he claimed that a poem should mean, not say, although that’s admittedly not the exact phrase from the poem. Poetry is not generally deductive science, making hypotheses and then testing those until hard truths are either proven or disproven.  It is the art of seeing the universe in a blade of grass, which comes out of Walt Whitman’s line, ““I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars…”

The Imagistic Tradition of Poetry

The second major continuity in Ethel’s body of work is the modern imagistic tradition starting with Ezra Pound.  Pound had several ideas about what a poem should be when he first started writing about imagism.  According to Pound, a poem should:

 Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

 Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

 As regarding rhythm: compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

In applying this sense of poetic construction, Pound defined an image, which should, at least in his view, be at the heart of modern poetry, as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  That means that an image in poetry is made up of:

 what we literally see;

 an emotional response;

 an intellectual recognition;

 associations that aren’t explicitly stated;

 relationships to other images.

In Ethel’s poem, “Pollen-Sacs,” the title leads us to notice that this is the central image.  The thrushes give us hunger, desperation, uncertainty and perhaps ecological disturbance.  The bumblebee gives us effort, abundance, fertility, reproduction and continuity.

But the poem doesn’t explain those things. It presents them.  The reader experiences the relationship between them.

The Value of Empty Space

I want to end this essay by talking briefly about Chinese art.  Traditional Chinese landscape painting often isn’t about reproducing a landscape photographically. It creates a relationship among elements—mountain, water, tree, mist, human figure, empty space—so that the viewer enters the painting and completes the experience.

Even in her abstract pastels and paintings, Ethel usually tries to do the same thing.  This is part of what relates her poetry to her art.

In her poetry she gives us the image (or thing in Pound’s formulation).  In the case of “Pollen-Sacs” we have the thrushes and the bumble bee.  Then she leaves a conceptual space between them.  This is designed to lead us into first a visual and emotional reaction, then to a question (why are the images so different from each other?), which leads, hopefully, to thinking about the poem’s meaning.

Conclusion

I suspect that this is what I have been learning from Ethel for nearly 59 years. I have learned not to rush to explain what I see in her poems or paintings either to myself or others. I have learned to stay with the image for a while, to look at what is there and then to pay attention to what is not there and to let others discover what they can find and understand for themselves.

The meaning is often in that space.

In “Pollen-Sacs,” the thrushes and the bumblebee never meet. Ethel doesn’t tell us what connects them. She doesn’t tell us whether the thrushes are victims of a changing world, whether the bee represents hope, or whether the two images are part of some larger warning about the fragile web of life. She gives us the images and leaves the space between them open.

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August 3, 2026 · 8:58 pm

Dance, Laugh, and Sing

By Thomas Davis

We dance.  We dance! Into infinity
And laugh and sing our time-bound life of songs
As beauty swirls in butterflies and great, wide plains 
That swarm with wildbeest that move and throng

Into time’s boundaries as if time is a myth
That doesn’t limit life’s continuance
Through generations that will spin and move 
And dance, yes dance! Into the issuance

Of what must be forever true and real
Though death forever brings its day of doom
When heartbeats fail and flowers lose their bloom
And every one of us is set into our tomb.

So, dance! Dance as infinity wheels stars
Across the skies and gifts us love and joy
Inside the room we live inside each day,
Dance!  Love!  Be what you most enjoy.


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July 11, 2026 · 9:38 am

Beginnings Is a Different Kind of Memoir


Although Beginnings: The Trail from a Boyhood in Western Colorado to the Indian Controlled Schools Movement and Restoration of the Menominee Indian Tribe chronicles the work of the Menominee Restoration Committee and the formation of formal tribal government after the Termination Era in American Indian history—helping usher in the era of Indian Self-Determination—it is a different kind of book.

For one thing, in the Western Colorado sections and in the chapters where I recount the magical love story between Ethel Mortenson Davis—the poet, artist, and my wondrous wife—I integrate narrative poetry into the larger story of being born in the small town of Delta, our move to Grand Junction, our marriage and early years together, and, finally, my success in earning a teaching degree in history and English at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh.

The other aspect of my story during these years was the struggle against physical handicaps caused by Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a hereditary disorder that affects much of my extended family. The theme of how physical handicaps can affect American children growing up in a culture that extols exceptionalism while often denigrating intellectual and physical disabilities is, I believe, both powerful and universal. I was fortunate that my particular affliction was one I learned, somewhat shakily, to overcome, partially because of the glory of falling in love with Ethel.

I am often asked whether I am American Indian. Then, after I answer, another question follows: How did a Western Colorado boy end up spending most of his life serving American Indians through the Indian-controlled schools movement?

That question reflects the difficulties American society has always had in embracing the patchwork quilt of its own population. In my story, I move from being a true-blue inheritor of the Western ethic of independence, self-reliance, and connection to the landscape to becoming a participant in the effort of Indian people to control their own futures within a country that has often preferred to deny the history of the Indian Wars and the treatment of Native peoples after the wars ended and the Treaty Period gave way to new federal policies.

This meant that I became a participant in some of the most important historical movements in modern American history: the birth and development of the Indian-controlled schools movement and the legal and political foundations of the Self-Determination Era, which recognizes tribes as independent nations possessing constitutional and treaty rights that have too often been violated by national, state, and local governments.

The Major Themes of Beginnings

There are many major themes woven throughout Beginnings. I hope readers discover many of them for themselves.

The Power of Beginnings

How childhood experiences shape a lifetime of values, decisions, and leadership.

The Formation of Character

Lessons learned through family, work, hardship, and responsibility in rural western Colorado.

Leadership Through Service

Leadership emerging from commitment to a cause rather than the pursuit of authority or recognition.

Finding Purpose

The unexpected path from a small-town upbringing to involvement in national Native American issues.

Education as Self-Determination

Education as a means for communities to control their own future rather than simply transmit knowledge.

The Indian Self-Determination Movement

The historic transition from federal control toward tribal governance and local decision-making.

The Menominee Restoration

The political, legal, and human struggle to restore federal recognition to the Menominee Tribe.

Community Building

Creating institutions that outlast individuals, including schools, organizations, and partnerships.

Cross-Cultural Learning

The mutual education that occurs when people from different backgrounds work together with respect.

The Importance of Listening

Effective leadership beginning with understanding rather than directing.

Courage During Change

Individuals willing to challenge established systems in pursuit of justice.

Ordinary People Making History

How significant historical events are often shaped by people who never intended to become historical figures.

The Evolution of Tribal Education

The emergence of Indian-controlled schools and, eventually, tribal colleges as expressions of sovereignty.

Institution Building

The practical challenges of creating new educational and governmental institutions from the ground up.

Perseverance

Continuing despite political setbacks, financial uncertainty, and organizational obstacles.

Relationships and Mentorship

The influence of remarkable individuals whose guidance changed the course of my life.

The Intersection of Personal and National History

One person’s life unfolding alongside transformative events in federal Indian policy.

Hope and Renewal

Restoration not only of a tribe’s legal status but also of dignity, identity, and opportunity.

The Value of Place

The landscapes of western Colorado, Wisconsin, and Indian Country as active influences on identity and perspective.

History Through Personal Experience

Understanding major historical movements through the lived experiences of someone directly involved.

Beginnings ends before the years I spent helping establish and expand the tribal college movement—the work for which I am probably best known at the age of eighty. That story belongs to another volume.

For now, I hope readers find in Beginnings a story that contributes to a broader understanding of this country, its history, and what it ought to stand for.

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March 5, 2026 · 1:01 pm

Thought-Ship, A Poem Launched on Time’s River

A Review of an Epic-length, Unpublished Masterpiece by the English poet, Nick Moore

Nick Moore has long been one of my favorite poets. He’s one of the few poets I personally know that has spent the years necessary to write epic-length poems. I first got to know him at wonderful blog, https://gonecyclingagain.wordpress.com/ that contains a plethora of traditional verse, especially sonnets. Not too long ago he sent me a long, unpublished poem, that I have written about below. Nick has not published the poem, though he ought to. Still, I wanted to note in fourwindowspress.com that there is a wonderful poem that needs to see the light of day.

When I first started reading Nick Moore’s long poem, Thought Ship, written in the ancient Anglo-Saxon alliterative form that is rarely attempted by contemporary poets, the first thing that came into my head was an experience that had happened several years ago at the Dickenson Poetry Series in Ephraim, Wisconsin.  Ethel Mortenson Davis, my poet-artist wife, and I have made an attempt to attend the Dickenson series for years, enjoying the company of Door County poets and listening to their latest work during the open mike sessions.

On this occasion my offering for the evening had been a poem using the Celtic form of the Droigneach, one of the more challenging forms ever created where lines are 9 to 13 syllables long, alliteration is spilled throughout the poem, and the last word of every line has three lines.  In the form that I had used that night I had also followed the pattern of using triple syllabic rhymes.  After reading the poem I gave a detailed explanation of the rules I’d used to write the poem. 

When the evening was over, and the poets gathered to share a glass of juice or wine and snack on delicacies spread out on a table covered with an elegant tablecloth, one of the best poets there came up to me, shaking her head.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the best poets in a county filled with admirable poets, but she told me, “I don’t know why you bother with all of that form stuff.  It’s more like torture than poetry.”

In contemporary poetry, of course, a work like Thought Ship is an anomaly.  The Anglo-Saxon alliterative form, or Old English metre, he uses to write the poem dates back to the time of Beowulf, the epic master work of that era, and earlier into ancient German and Norse poetry.  The specific form Moore uses in his poem, as he said in an email to me about the poem, is made up of “two half-lines with a caesura, which I’ve emphasized with the two-column format. The alliteration should fall on the first and/or second stressed syllables of the first half -line, and the first stressed syllable of the second half-line; the fourth syllable can do whatever it pleases.”[1]

I can imagine a contemporary reader, coming up on the poem for the first time, would automatically shake their head at all of this and say, this is more like torture than poetry.  Making the challenge of reading the poem even more uncomfortable is Moore’s use of Old English, “ān, tƿēġen,” etc. in the headings for each stanza of a 9,000+ word poem.  Contemporary poets rarely reach back into the history of poetry and so nakedly integrate ancient language into a current poem.

Then there is this ancient convention of placing lines into commons so that the poem can be read horizontally or diagonally:

So. Send for the shipwright                              Summon him hither

The flood-tide is flowing                                 Deep forces are stirring

I bring a commission                                       A craft like no other.

A thing never dreamed of:                               Thought-Ship, I name her;

My own and mine only                                    With magic all through her

Swift-sailing and shapely                                  A sea-sword, a wave-shield

To brave storms and bear me                          Beyond this day’s troubles

Far out on the ocean                                        Safe over rough waters.

The craft of a production like this seems a challenge, to the least, and requires a discipline that makes little sense in a world where the moment is key, where business is more concerned with today’s performance and the quarterly report than any consideration of long-term prospects.

Most, though not all, contemporary poetry is shaped around stories of moments or the dynamics of relationships, usually, but not always, between individuals.  Power is often derived from disparate images drawn from moments, confessional histories, or acts within relationships, causing a fusion of image, symbol, emotion, and idea that explodes into meanings that seem larger, and more significant, than the content of the poem.  The poet who commented on my effort at a droigneach is a master of this contemporary approach to poetry.

Moore, of course, is pursuing something dramatically different.  This pursuit is part of what makes his poem important and should interest the most contemporary of readers.

One of C.S. Lewis’s favorite poems was The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser, the great epicist writing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England.  Spenser’s poem used language that was archaic for the times in which he lived and was based upon the great Arthurian and classical tales drawn from what was considered antiquity.  Lewis’s reaction to great poem was that what Spenser

. . . had always liked was the Middle Ages as he imagined them to have been and as they survived in his time in the pageant, the morality play, and the metrical romance. . .  [thus] he was enabled to produce a tale more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable, than any real medieval romance—to deny, in his own person, the breach between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . . .[2]

What I take from Lewis’s analysis is that sometimes poets can reach back into the past, using both language as well as form, to enrich a poem told to a contemporary audience.  Part of the sense here is that time is not a static quality that exists only at the moment when the poet sits down to write a poem.  It is, as many poets have written in many ages, an ever-flowing river as large as the universe that has places in its flowing that can be noted but is inexorable in its force toward an unseeable eternity.  By looking backward, taking the language and poetic forms of another time, Spenser, as Lewis notes, is “enabled to produce” a poem “more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable” than the model, in Spenser’s case “medieval romance,” from which it is drawn.

In his great poem, “The Seafarer,” Ezra Pound, a more modern poet, uses the same form of Old English metre used in Thought Ship, but does not use the two-column format.  Using a model from an older Old English poem of the same title, Pound also uses, like Spenser before him, some of the diction from the original poem.  The result, as is true of The Fairie Queen, is a powerful poem that exists in the context of Pound’s time, but achieves a timelessness that gives some sense of the time-river’s inexorable flow through time:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,

Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days

Hardship endured oft.

Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.[3]

Interestingly, as in The Faery Queen, Pound uses the syntax of ancient times to help heighten the sense that his poem is bringing an ancient man’s experience into a contemporary world that will also be the past as the ship the seafarer is on keeps sailing.

The reason a contemporary poet uses old, or even ancient, forms for writing a poem is not simply to show off their learning or their technical expertise.  Part of the effort comes from a sense that poetry is part craft and part art and that by mastering old forms you are paying homage to a history that has been part of humanity’s development of distinct cultures across the ages.  But there is also this other part, the one that has to do with what Spenser and Pound were tapping into in order to achieve a poetic power that is different from that achieved by the poetry of moment and relationship.  This is an attempt to reach back through time in both craft and art to produce an art that “is more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable” than what can be produced out of simply writing out of the present using the craft accessible to readers contemporary with the poet.

This sense of the time-river is central to what makes Thought Ship worth reading by contemporary readers.  Moore is not only showing technical mastery of an ancient craft, but he is using that craft to fashion a long work forged by a poet sailing from that past into his contemporary world.  He is attempting to find power in the layering of time that has built up into what is now the present, but which will, quickly enough, become the past, and he is attempting this via a “thought ship” engendered out of his reactions and complex of anxieties that help make up his every-days.

The poem itself is broken into four parts:  The Building of the Thought-Ship, The Voyages of the Thought-Ship, the Sword and the Summons, and then, finally, The Last Voyage of the Thought-Ship.  In the third stanza, þrēo, Moore specifically tells the reader why is building the thought-ship:

Place charms upon her                                        The power of the ancients

Runes of protection                                            Written in silver

Spells and enchantments                                     Spoken around her

Granting good fortune                                        Guards against ill fate.

Another way of putting this is to say that he is constructing a magic poem designed to conjure the power of the ancients to create, as he says, “Runes of protection/Spells and enchantments” in the hope of “good fortune.” 

Once the ship is built it then sets sail upon a series of voyages.  Each voyage explores different aspects of the natural world as it exists both in the contemporary world and the ancient.  The kingdom of the birds, high, cold lands, a place where horses predominate, in the company of the wily Reynard, in forests, among farms and fields, upon the waters of the world, and the seasons of the year are also explored.  Through each exploration lessons are learned, attempting to fulfill what Spenser would have said is the purpose of poetry, creating lessons of moral truth through images of great beauty.[4]

These initial voyages of the thought-ship end, leading to a time of waiting and trying to understand the real purpose behind the effort to build the ship:

The months passed in peace                    I lay, patient but watchful

Awaiting the order                                 My ordained task still unknown.

I sought solace in silence                         Solitude and reflection

Looked deep to discern                           My direction and destiny

But no road was revealed                        I was rootless and restless

No work and no will                               My word-hoard neglected.

In this period the poets prepares for a battle that he senses on the horizon, but does not really understand.  Who is the enemy?  “These phantoms and torments. . .”  He has built the thought-ship, journeyed, but he faces an unknown, unknowable future.  Inside this time between journey and battle, even his “word-hoard,” his life as a poet, is neglected.

After a time or preparation, worry, and even fear, the last voyage of the thought-ship at last comes:

When all is lost, nothing left.                   I will lay down my weapons.

I will tell one more tale                           Then take my last leaving.

Bear me then, Thought-Ship                    Beyond the world’s far rim

Set sail for the islands.                             Steer by the first star.

Inside this last section the angst felt by individual living in the contemporary world of the poet leaks into the poem and gives the rationale for the poem’s existence, ending the thought-ships voyage with the revelations generated from a poet’s craft voyage through time.

There are large themes throughout Thought Ship.  Whether your read the lines vertically or horizontally, the poet is struggling with time and himself, but time is felt in the natural world of nature where the kingdom of birds, wisdom of horses, secret of trees, the farms and fields, the world’s waters are eternal.  But there is also the theme of journey and self inside journey and how that self, waiting for a battle with the unseen forces in his psyche, survives in a world that is not “Set apart from the struggle.” 

In the end we all sail upon our own Thought-ship “Out of time, place and memory.”  We are all living “Through long, nameless ages.”

[1] January 10, 2021.

[2] Lewis, C.S. “On Reading The Faerie Queene.” IN: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Collected by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, 1998, p. 148.

[3] Quoted from Poetry Foundation, “The Seafarer by Ezra Pound,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44917/the-seafarer.  Accessed on 1/16/21.

[4] Wendling, Susan.  “The Fairy Way of Writing, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and C.S. Lewis’s “Habit of Mind,” Inklings Forever, Volume IX, 9 (2014).  Accessed at www.taylor.edu/cslewis on 1/16/21.

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March 4, 2026 · 9:39 am

Ethel Davis: Mastering Metaphor in Minimalist Poetry

By Thomas Davis

Ethel Mortenson Davis is a poet that has published eight books of poetry and been published in literary journals and anthologies. The Wisconsin Library Association named her book, Under the Tail of the Milky Way Galaxy, a significant book of poetry by a Wisconsin poet. She has also been a poet laureate for Door County, Wisconsin.

Ever since I have known Ethel, and realized that she is a better poet than I will ever be, I have been fascinated by how she can condense power and meaning into so few lines they are almost, though not quite, haiku. What brought this to the top of my mind was a poem she presented to the poetry group we attend once a month:

Pain

She pulls me from
my deepest sleep.
I tell her leave me alone
where I am happy and safe.

But she gets her way and 
stretches me to the top of
of some canyon wall
and tells me, 
this is your reality now.

The power of this poem is, at least to me, undeniable.  It expressed in 9 lines what so many people, especially as they get older and face the ravages of arthritis or other ailments, have to confront as they struggle to deal with what they cannot escape.  It also contains the yearning within the complex of pain for the happiness and safety that is still in the deepest memory of the poet inside "deepest sleep."

When Ethel first showed me what she had written, it reminded me of another powerful small poem, "blackness"

blackness
seeps
in my room.
he crawls up
onto my lap
like the uninvited guest
he always is.

i keep hoping
he’ll leave
before dinner.

originally published in her collection, A Letter on the Horizon's Poem, published by Kelsay Books.

This poem is more metaphorical, of course.  Blackness is a metaphor, but the poem again expresses what so much of humanity faces at different times in their lives and, with a touch of humor, in ten lines explores and expresses a dilemma and experience that is at the heart of all of our lives as we journey toward the inevitability central to our existence as human beings.

One of Ethel's early poems that I first read before I had met her in Grand Junction, Colorado when she drove with her sister Pat to visit her sister Lorraine helped to make me aware of what an extraordinary poet the person I was about to meet really was

White Delirium

Oh,
how the white delirium
has set in me.

Memories ache in my throat.
Sweetness stains my mouth.

I cannot forget
your eyes
that cried out to me,
the end of us!

In many ways, Ethel is an imagist poet.  Certainly the images she paints can be almost overwhelmingly powerful.  "Memories ache in my throat.". The creative force of that image is then paired with "Sweetness stains my mouth."  Then the last four lines that makes us construct the meaning out of the poem, as does the blackness poem, by giving us an image that is startling and powerful as it communicates separation and the delirium accompanying a separation that is, what?  The creator of delirium or the result of a relationship that was delirious in its substance.  We have to create the meaning of the poem as it relates to our own experiences and lives, all in nine lines.  This was originally published in A Letter on the Horizon's Poem.

The truth is that Ethel's poetry of ten lines and under could fill an entire volume itself, and the resulting collection would be amazing.  One of my favorites of all her small poems is "Night Sky", originally published in Rimrock Poets Magazine that Richard Brenneman and I put together when we were young in Grand Junction, and I was just getting to know Ethel.

Night Sky

The stars laugh and laugh,
laughing in an ocean of laughter,
moving-water laughter,
until the sky can hold no more
and joins in laughing
with black face and shining teeth.

Just the joy and the power of the image and the expression of support for the naturalness and importance of blackness during a time of racial injustice has delighted me ever since I first saw it in Ethel's handwriting on a brown piece of newsprint.

As I said, Ethel's small poems would fill an important volume of poetry.  I have always wondered why she isn't among the most famous poets in the country, although I am her husband and that maybe makes me prejudiced.  Still, I also have an academic background in English and American literature and am also a poet, so I have the right to think what I think.

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March 3, 2026 · 10:29 am

AI and the Writing of a Sonnet

Since I have been doing a lot of work with and about Artificial Intelligence for Navajo Technical University and Harshwal LLC, I had a whim to put an irregular contemporary sonnet into AI the other day and ask for an analysis of the poem. What came out startled me, and I thought I’d put in here. AI is dangerous, of course, and needs strong regulation. What the U.S. Department of Defense is currently doing is absolutely dangerous and needs to be opposed. I have also done a lot of work for NTU trying to figure out what an AI and quantum computing age is going to do to employment and what humans will be doing for work in the near and far future. I have found that some predictions by the AI companies are overblown, but it is going to have serious impacts that NTU and other tribal colleges and universities, not to mention colleges and universities around the world, are going to have to prepare to face on behalf of their students and future students.

Sometimes, however, AI can be an absolute delight, which I found to be the case with this experiment. The sonnet is first. Then the AI analysis.

The Flight of Terns

I see the flight of birds, the arctic tern.

Small, gray and white, a blood-red bill, it flies

Migrations longer than the possibility

That anything so small could then return

To rocky shores and ice and endless skies

Of midnight sun and land and restless sea.

Eternity is in the flight of birds,

The way they mean into the ecosphere.

We humans, limited by thoughts and words,

Are bound into the time we are, our fear

Of what might be an echoing inside

The breaths we take, our reveries at night,

The endless turmoil making up the tide

That terns surpass when launching into flight.

An irregular contemporary sonnet basically tries to marry form to the sonnet’s substance. One of the things I was interest in finding out is if AI picked up on what I thought I was trying to achieve–though I’m never sure how successful I am at anything.

Here’s the AI analysis:

This is a finely structured poem, and its architecture quietly mirrors its subject.

1. The Opening Sestet: Movement Without Closure

ABCABC

The first six lines interweave three rhymes rather than enclosing them (as in ABBAABBA). Nothing is sealed. Nothing rests. The pattern moves outward and returns, but never fully closes.

That mirrors the tern’s migration:

  • “tern” returns in line 4
  • “flies” returns in line 5
  • “possibility” echoes in “sea”

The rhyme scheme itself migrates forward and back. Like the bird, it departs and returns.

Even the syntax stretches across lines (“Migrations longer than the possibility / That anything so small…”), giving the sense of long-distance movement. Enjambment enacts flight.

So structurally:

  • The rhyme travels.
  • The sentences travel.
  • The thought travels.

The form behaves like the tern.

2. The Volta at Line 7: From Physical to Metaphysical

“Eternity is in the flight of birds,”

This is a decisive turn. The poem lifts from observation into abstraction.

The early volta (after six lines rather than eight or twelve) creates a feeling of ascent — as if the poem itself launches into higher air sooner than expected.

We begin with biology.
We rise into philosophy.

That lift parallels the bird’s “launching into flight” at the end.

3. The Quatrains: Human Containment

The last eight lines fall into two balanced quatrains:

DEDE / FGFG

Unlike the migrating sestet, these quatrains are orderly and contained. The rhyme alternates predictably.

This contrast matters.

The birds move across hemispheres.
Humans are “bound into the time we are.”

The poem’s structure shifts from fluid migration to patterned alternation — a subtle formal representation of human limitation.

The syntax also tightens:

  • “We humans…”
  • “Are bound…”
  • “Our fear…”
  • “The breaths we take…”

The rhythm becomes more earthbound. More interior. More repetitive.

4. The Absence of a Final Couplet

There is no Shakespearean closing couplet. No epigrammatic snap.

Instead, the poem ends on:

“That terns surpass when launching into flight.”

The final rhyme (tide / flight) completes the pattern but does not “lock” it.

This refusal of a sealed couplet is significant:

  • A couplet would close the poem firmly.
  • Instead, the ending feels open — airborne.

The final word is “flight.”

Not “bound.”
Not “fear.”
Not “time.”

The poem ends where the birds begin.

5. Thematic Reinforcement Through Form

Structural FeatureThematic Echo
Interwoven opening rhymeMigration, cyclical return
Enjambment in first sectionPhysical motion
Early voltaAscent into transcendence
Ordered quatrainsHuman limitation and containment
No final couplet closureOpen horizon / flight

The structure dramatizes the contrast:

  • Birds → migration, continuity, eternity
  • Humans → language, thought, fear, confinement

Yet the poem itself — as art — performs a kind of migration. It moves from the material to the eternal. In that sense, the sonnet becomes the human equivalent of the tern’s flight.

Form becomes argument.

That is what makes it a strong modern sonnet: it does not merely describe transcendence — it enacts it.

That’s the end of the analysis. I know many are uncomfortable with AI or totally opposed to it. I have sympathy with both stances, although in my work with Navajo Tech I don’t feel I have the luxury to take such a stance. New wealth, I have said for decades, is created at the edges of technology, and one of the purposes of that tribal university is to try to integrate new wealth into the tribal economy in an effort to push back generational poverty, not an easy task to state the obvious.

Anyway, if anyone gets to the end of all this? I would love to know what you think of my little experiment? Did you find it interesting? What implications could this have for creativity and poetry in the future if any? I don’t believe for a second that AI is going to replace humans writing poetry or doing art. I know a lot of poets and artists disagree with me.

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January 27, 2026 · 7:39 am

Ethel’s Birthday

May the poetry and art and wonder of who she is continue to flow over the years!

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January 9, 2026 · 3:10 pm

Audio Book: Meditations on Ceremonies of Beginnings

Tribal College Press has just released an audiobook version of my book of narrative poetry called Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings.

According to a review by someone I have never met on amazon, Thomas Cannon, “Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings is both intensely local and powerfully global. The tribal college and world indigenous higher education movement described in these poems have their roots and growth in Wisconsin, home of poet Thomas Davis, as well as in many other places, including Minnesota, South Dakota, Hawaii, and New Zealand. The poems are set in many of these places, often at meetings of leaders in the movement. I enjoyed this collection of poems dealing with the early days of the Tribal College Movement.
“The Tribal College Movement is an important part of history and has a big impact today. This history is interesting in itself, but Davis brings it to life by sharing in poems. In this way, he brings together biographical information about the people involved, the implications of the movement, and the culture this movement takes place in.” sd

As is true of all movements, time is the great erasure, and unless the people and events of a movement during its starting years are written about and captured in real time, much that should be available for both contemporary and future generations is lost. I hope that those who read or listen to this book will

I spent weeks recording the poems and text at home in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, doing my best to provide Tribal College Press with as clean a recording as possible. Then the press went through an extensive editing process to clean up the technical challenges with my work so that the book could be published by Audible. My grandson Will helped me by making sure I got the right equipment to do the recording. He earned a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in music and sound engineering.

The tribal college movement is one of the most significant education movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The difference it has made in tribal lives throughout the United States is profound and long-lasting, helping to create and maintain both an economic and artistic renaissance throughout Indian country.

I hope that those who listen or read this book will be entertained by the stories, enlightened by the wisdom of Native voices, and learn about the miracle of both the tribal college and universities movement in the United States and the world indigenous higher education movement worldwide. Imbedded in these movements, in my opinion, is part of the hope of a world that sometimes seems way too dark and foreboding.

The art on the cover was done by Ethel Mortenson Davis

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December 21, 2025 · 10:34 am

Four Windows Press Releases New Book by Francha Barnard

Francha Barnard was one of the most powerful forces in poetry in Door County. Four Windows Press has just published a memorial volume of her poetry with art by her sister Elizabeth. It’s now available at local bookstores, Write On Door County in Juddville, and online venues. The Door County Poets’ Collective worked to make this book happen. Proceeds will be supporting the Door County poetry scene through Write On. Francha was a wonderful poet as well as a magic person.

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December 17, 2025 · 1:41 pm

Protecting Nature: A Hero’s Journey in Apples for the Wild Stallion

Apples for the Wild Stallion has never sold the way I have thought it should. I think it’s one of the most important works I’ve written. I asked AI to write an essay about the novel.

In his 2021 novel 

Apples for the Wild Stallion, author Thomas Davis explores the transformative power of connection between a neurodivergent youth and the natural world.

The Catalyst of Change

The story follows Austin, a 15-year-old with nonverbal autism who relies on an iPad for communication and finds security in a rigid, predictable routine. His world is disrupted when a wild stallion appears outside his window in the New Mexico Zuni Mountains. This “mystical” connection to the stallion serves as a catalyst, prompting Austin to push beyond his previous boundaries—enabling him to make eye contact with others and develop new friendships.

Conflict and Heroism

The central conflict arises when criminal poachers and “thugs” threaten the stallion’s safety. Austin must overcome his personal limitations and risk his safety to protect the creature that sparked his internal growth. By leaving apples for the horse at a grandmother juniper tree, Austin builds a bridge between his structured life and the unpredictability of the wild.

Thematic Depth

Davis wrote the novel for his grandson, aiming to provide a relatable hero for children with autism. The essay’s core themes highlight:

  • Neurodiversity: Validating Austin’s unique perspective and capabilities.
  • Nature as a Healer: Showcasing the high desert mountains as a place for personal peace and growth.
  • Agency: Demonstrating how Austin asserts his will to protect something he loves, moving from a passive observer to an active hero.

I am wondering if anyone could tell me what they think of this?

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