by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I remember
how the winter days
had to be just right,
shining-cold
without a sign of wind,
to get the ponds like glass
and how we shined the glass
beneath the snow
to look at giant seas
caught under the ice
by some surprise glacier.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
Outside winds howled with snow and bitter cold.
The phone rang: “Mrs. Davis?” asked a girl.
She sounded frightened. “Yes?” Her voice controlled,
too soft, the girl said, “Kevin…” Strong emotions swirled
into the howling of the storm, the cold, the snow.
“I’m scared,” she said at last. His mother caught her breath.
He’s hours away, she thought. It’s twenty-five below.
The roads are ice. This is a night for death.
“I’ll wait here with him, but you have to come.”
No cars were on the road that late at night.
She crawled across the miles, the constant drum
of howling winds accentuating fright
that made her fierce when, shaken, stunned,
she put her arms around her struggling son.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
Ethel’s new book, White Ermine Across Her Shoulders is available now at Barnes and Noble and other online retailers:
White Ermine Across Her Shoulders has all the elements expected by
readers of Ethel Mortenson Davis’s poetry. The lines are highly imagistic
and intense. Descriptions of the earth’s beauty are intermingled with
comments, sometimes caustic, about the human experience. Often a
music rises that is both emotional and filled with language and insights
that remain in the memory long after the book has been put down. This,
Davis’s second volume, speaks eloquently about Kevin Michael Davis, her
son who died of cancer in 2010 in Poughkeepsie, NY, and touches on other
family relationships, making some of the poems more personal than those
she has published before. These poems are balanced with an understanding
of the universe and all of its creatures that encompasses both delight and
wisdom. What makes this collection appealing is an intellectual depth that
resonates, in the way of Emily Dickenson, with the imagistic and emotional
core that has always been a hallmark of Davis’s poetry.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry, Published Books
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The stealth of migrations
move across the land
under cover of darkness,
moving in hundreds
and then thousands.
You told me
about your car lights
shining in a canyon
one night–
“More elk than
one could imagine,”
moving to the southern places
where canyons lap over canyons,
lands whose vastness is greater
than the mind can comprehend,
unlike the northern deer
that migrate further north
to find giant spruce trees
whose branches touch
the ground to make
a snowless, warm canopy
for the wintering.
You said, “The axe blade
is sharpened, ready
to chop the bone
at the joints.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Fall Wildflowers at Chaco Canyon, by Alazanto, Kevin Davis, our son
Walking Doors
by Alazanto, Kevin Davis
An old woman sits at edge of the road.
She waits for doors to walk through her,
but is greeted by a kiss to her cheek
from lush breezes
finding their sanctuary
in a sun who wants to be close.
A jackrabbit takes comfort in scurrying across her feet,
ears trailing a thousand miles–
and dangerous expectations
lunging forward a thousand years.
Some might say
needles of energy
warn of their love
as they patter onto the tops of black umbrellas.
Ripening seashells,
pernicious treetops, and
attentive arrowheads
all follow in slipstream
of that affectionate sun:
nova in a moment’s clarity.
The movement of an eternity
might be introduced to stillness:
Pocket mirrors would turn to sand,
covering the earth
and reflecting a newfound radiance of boiling hope.
Empty clay basins would soon over-wash
with psychical retinas,
as whispers emerge from the roots of long grasses.
In such confusing brilliance…
…the breezes are left to ponder,
“What if the sun no longer wanted to be so close?”
The sun assures,
“My affections are captured by your songs.
We both find sanctuary in our binding differences.
We must never doubt the depths of inspiration.”
Filed under Art, Photography, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
On my walk
this morning
I reached down to pick
a sacred-colored blossom,
but hummingbird flew out!
I’ll leave this table
for you.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
4
Three children, daughters and a son, each one
so precious that they sang alive our days,
extending who we were into a sun-
filled destiny where joy and love and praise
would always spin out like a spool of string
into the future where we’d live in glory.
So many memories: The girls on swings,
our son enraptured by a funny story,
the kind of living fashioned from the touch
of life on life, from parents into child,
the common daily motions that are such
a part of who we humans are, selves tiled
into a kaleidoscope of moment histories
defining love, our deepest human mystery.
8
To Mary
As tiny, delicate as butterflies,
she sleeps inside the tent they’ve put her in.
Too young for whooping cough, her breathing, cries,
are fluttering, her living stretching thin
across the fact that she’s too young, too new
to face what is a harsh reality.
A second daughter, miracle so true
she opens up a universe to be.
Her mother spends a night, two nights, tense hours
of waiting, waiting for her breath to clear.
When those you love are threatened, all the towers
of hope constructed when you’re free of fear
are held suspended, waiting for the charm
of holding one small baby in your arms.
24
To Sonja
As beautiful as autumn maple leaves,
Vesuvius fires locked deep inside her bones,
she finds the strength to face her trials and weave
a rising from the place where she’s been thrown.
Sometimes her fires stir up a sweeping wind
that uproots trees and changes what has been,
but through the storms of life she keeps her friends
and throws her stress into a rubbish bin.
First born, her independence drove us wild
when hormones had her stretch her fledgling wings.
We wanted family, but in this shining child
we had a bird who wanted songs she made to sing.
And now she has a husband, two young sons,
A woman walking proudly in the sun.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The white birches:
Young girls
in long, white dresses,
blackberry eyes
peering out,
laughing at the winter,
peeling their dresses,
laughing
with flapping mouths jumping,
swinging in brown grass,
lovers of tall grasses,
hiding in one another’s dresses,
black eyes lost
to racing clouds.
Long, white dresses,
white skins,
lost. . .
left
in the summer’s
games.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The old poet,
thrown out,
weeps across
the desert
until he climbs
the rim of the canyon,
and there he takes
a page from his book
and writes,
“There is a canyon people
who celebrate the first laugh
of their children.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
22
At Newport Beach the sun was shining Spring.
Offshore, out in Lake Michigan, clouds brewed
in swelling rolls lit white by sun, a multitude
of giants in a day so still the wings
of seabirds hardly moved as, white, they swing
above the lake into the shore, the mood
created like perfection, interlude
between the storms our selves are apt to sing.
Our daughters swim against the waves and laugh.
Our son, absorbed, collects a pile of stones
and makes a wall on sand, an autograph
soon lost to water and the wave’s white foam.
Time freezes in our minds, but arrows past,
though we would make our times together last.
23
Time turns into a cruelty of hours.
The battle fought to find a snatch of hope,
our conversations as we tried to grope
with decades shrunk to days, and youthful powers
reduced to helplessness and empty hours,
our words of love as time, the misanthrope,
snatched from the two of us the skills we need to cope
with dread and loss and cancer’s awful power.
He doesn’t wake. He doesn’t speak. His breath
is ragged; coughing rattles in his chest.
His face is yellow, thin; it hints of death
to come–so suffering will end with rest.
And as we wait, time crawls where once it flew,
as mutable as good times we once knew.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
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