Ethel Mortenson Davis
Your cheek
is against
the universe.
I see you
in the plumed
desert flower
that has blossomed
because of many
winter snows,
standing erect
against driving winds,
and in
the desert iris,
sky-blue,
who takes her stand
wild-eyed
against all odds.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
When I fell into a word
and saw a slime slug by
in a rainbow of trailing foam,
I tried to speak,
but all I could say
was that tripping into words
was a strange way to live a life,
even when rainbows fizzed and popped
all over the place,
and gold rained light
into blank corners of who you could be, but weren’t.
Then, struggling from one word trap into another,
like a hero from a great film
that reels on and on into forever,
as foaming rainbow tipped upside down,
I lost my head
and started dancing from invisible star to star
even though the word I was in
was so sticky it made dancing as jerky
as Frankenstein’s movement
in Mary Shelly’s head.
Looking for meaning in all this
I tripped again and fell upside down
into the rainbow’s arc
where tomorrow was no more
and the screaming present more real
than any mythology conjured up by images
made concrete by a poet’s out of control pen.
When I grabbed onto yet another word
bathed in rainbow light
and endowed with more fizz than pop,
I stopped falling
and herded into an elegant forest
where words fluted and piped
and created a strangeness in my head
that threatened sanity
and promised life was an ant hill
teeming with more than what could be said
by crawling around in words all day.
At that moment I swore off words forever
and became the poet of silence,
dancing with this babe
who wore words as a cloak
that revealed more than it ever hid.
No wonder poets chase after words
as if they are delightful–
even when meanings turn on them
and leave them gasping like butterflies
fluttering on the point of a pin.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Today, coyote,
I will let you
own this land.
For you stood
your ground
this morning
across our path,
unwavering,
until I turned
to leave.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
She’d showed him Vassar on his first day there.
That evening, going home, she saw him walking
a street so bleak he should have been aware
no stranger should be nonchalantly hiking.
She stopped her car, rolled down the window, frowning,
and asked him if he knew where he was at.
He laughed and said that he was lost, eyes sparkling,
“but I’ll be fine.” He was an alley cat.
She shook her head, but watched him walk and chat
about the universe, his mind engaged,
his deep-song spirit like an acrobat
that dares to fly upon Creation’s stage.
And somehow, starting from a place apart,
He/she flamed bright inside each other’s hearts.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
To Sonja
I had no choice
because the earth and sky
threw up so much
poetry,
no choice
but to accept
the High Tea Ceremony.
That night,
and all the day before,
the earth was cold
with wind-driven snow,
inhuman nurses
in an old hospital,
the father barred
from my room.
Finally your time came
in the early morning
with dark skies and gray clouds
like the snow clouds
over the mesas this morning
that came
with wind-driven snow
and ice crystals.
But in a moment,
the sun had shone
in the threatening blackness,
and a great arc of rainbow
bowed across the western
and northern skies,
making it all worthwhile.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
Where do the minutes that we cherished go?
Two little girls, small hands inside our hands
while four of us walk in a wonderland
of starting out, our faces, hearts aglow
with happiness unrecognized, the flow
of time suspended as its hourglass sands
erase the moment when our lives were grand.
What happens to the joys of long ago?
We never thought the love we two had made
would fly apart in anger, or be lost
to liver cells that turned, as renegades,
into a cancerous, dark, evil holocaust.
We never knew we’d face insidious shades
that leave us mourning all the times we’ve lost.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The brightly-colored
towhee
brings webbing
to repair
my broken,
gray world.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
The doctor said what needed to be said.
We asked the questions that we had to ask.
Compassion lined the doctor’s careful mask.
She held him; he held her; the awful dread
we’d felt at seeing him so weak in bed
now turned into a nightmare, a formal masque
that left our darkest primal fears unmasked,
our sense of living shattered, left in shreds.
How long? he asked the doctor as he sighed.
The doctor said, two weeks, some hours, some days.
She bent her head into his lap and cried;
he sobbed, his mother cried; I fought the haze
unmanning me. What could we do? I tried
to think, but, looking at my son, was dazed.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
For Sophia and Phoebe
Because this night is filled
with black-winged pelicans
coming in to land,
a sail being taken down,
a sliver of a moon
climbing above
the white birch trees,
and laugher from young girls
rising above the lapping waves,
no more can fit
into the evening.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
fourwindowspress 