Category Archives: Thomas Davis

October 31, 2015 · 8:50 am

Metamorphisis

by Thomas Davis

I lay beside an ancient, quiet pool
and put my idle hand into the water.
A rainbow trout swam nibbling past.
Without a thought I held its thrashing fast.
The trout became a whiskery, wily otter.

I squeezed as if I’d turned into a ghoul
whose only thought was how to hold
an otter in my thrall forevermore.
The otter twisted like a fiend,
and when that failed, it bared sharp teeth and screamed.

My spirit quailed and heart turned icy cold.
Between two breaths the eagle was a child.
He looked at me and slowly, sadly smiled.

I dropped her when her human voice began to sing.
I looked into the shine of golden eyes;
the child became a woman beautiful and wise.

The woman turned and swiftly swam away.
I jumped into the pool, but she was gone —
And now I’ve spent these many years
bedazzled by an otter with a woman’s face,
Ensorcelled by a quiet water place.

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September 8, 2015 · 8:38 am

Incident on Washington Island

After the Civil War
a Miltonian Sonnet with a Double Coda

by Thomas Davis

As Ambrose Betts gulped down the whiskey shot
That Gullickson had given him, his face
Was flushed, the muscles in his neck a knot
So tight he winced, his outrage out of place
Inside the cabin’s half lit single room.

“A Winnebago brave! I tell you Gullickson,”
He said. “As large as life inside the gloom
Of Miner’s kitchen, Bullock looking drawn,
As if he’d seen a ghost, as black as coal.
I’ve never seen the like before!” he yelled.
“An Indian, white man, black man like a shoal
Of pebbles on a beach. The Indian held
His hand up, said, I swear, to Bullock, “You,”
He said. “The first white man I ever knew.”

“Old Bullock, black as night,
Smiled with those teeth of his
So dazzlingly bright white
My head began to fizz.

“And Miner looked like God
About to haul back, smack
The Indian into sod.
A white man that is black!”

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August 7, 2015 · 11:14 am

“By God, They’re Protecting Salamanders Rather Than Human Beings!”

comment heard in a restaurant in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin
by Thomas Davis
An Italian Sonnet
 
When Darwin saw gradation in a finch
That flits about Galapagous[1], he saw
One species modified in beak and claw
By choices made adapting to the flinch
Of circumstances born out of the wrench
Of geologic time, the pitch and yaw
Of land and ocean, weather systems raw
With winds that shape the land that rainstorms drench.
 
But in his old age earthworms sang the song
That sirened through the studies that he did[2],
The deaf and blind regurgitator dug
Into plain ground turned soil, the endless round
Of earth built by the living plows that slid
Fecundity out of the realm of slugs.

[1] Darwin traveled to the Galapagos Islands on a ship named Beagle where he developed the theory of evolution out of his observations of the gradations between a number of species, including a finch.
[2] Earthworms was Darwin’s last book, published on 10 October 1881, just six months before he died.
 

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July 19, 2015 · 8:45 am

A Prophet Arrives on Washington Island

A French Sonnet

by Thomas Davis

The old black man, eyes bright as noonday sun,
Splashed from the wooden boat onto the shore.
He lifted up his voice, the waves Death’s Door
Whipped white behind him, praised the blessed Son
Of God and New Jerusalem and spun
Around, his arms held high, a troubadour
Of his escape from slavery and war
To wilderness, the role of sacristan
To fisherman and men and women freed
From whips and masters and slaver’s creed
Of dominance designed to pinch the soul
And void the human spirit’s vital flame.

“Praise God!” the prophet said, the roll
Of waves against his feet. “Praise God’s sweet name!”

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July 3, 2015 · 12:47 pm

About Men and Geese

A French Sonnet

by Thomas Davis

The child Konrad Lorenz was read a book.
Nils Holgersson hopped on a goose’s back
And flew into a flock of geese whose lack
Of sympathy for greedy boys, that look
Into their selves and quickly see how rooks
And geese and other creatures cannot hack
The glory of a monomaniac,
Was clearly honking, stupid gobbledegook.

Hooked by a story, vexed by lack of wings,
Konrad Lorenz began to think of things
He saw in ducks that waddled in his yard —
Until he seemed to see with goose’s eyes,
A man not just a man, but mage and bard
That flapped mind’s wings into a goose’s skies.

Note: Konrad Lorenze was a Novel Prize winning ethologist who became famous for studying the evolution of behavior in geese.

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June 2, 2015 · 9:31 am

The Composer

by Thomas Davis

An Italian, or Petrarchan, Sonnet

He searched a year to find the cedar tree,
Determined that he’d find a lofty lord
That towered dark and gleaming like a sword
Thrust upward with a shaggy filigree
Of branches singing winds into a sea
Of sky where hawks and eagles soared
And wings stitched sky to land, a linking poured
Into the heartbeat of his fantasy.

He dreamed the tree into the song he sang,
Then fingered ancient rosewood cello strings
Into the filigree of cedar wind
That bowed as cries of distant eagles rang
Into the sky and wove tree, song, and wings
Into a music that will never end.

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May 10, 2015 · 10:17 am

On Mother’s Day

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.

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April 25, 2015 · 3:08 pm

In the Nursing Home

by Thomas Davis

Memory silks like a worm
into a place where comfort ought to be.

Inside a kitchen, bristling with energy,
the woman sits beside a young man
who looks as if he’s lost what self he had.

“You can’t tell anyone, no relatives.”
Her voice was hitched, almost a whisper,
but still as strong as springtime river currents.

The young man looks at her, tongue-tied.

“In Dalhart, Texas, years ago,
you had a second cousin birth twins,”
she said. “The scandal tore the family
as if a funnel cloud had come from nowhere,
ripping our family tree and smashing it
to smithereens, its remnants strewn debris.”

She looked at the young man, saw how words
had brought blood to eyes, reddening them,
hands clutched below the table.

“One twin was black, the other white,” she said.
“Your cousin’s husband concluded sin the moment
the doctor tossed the news into his craw.”

She wrung her hands upon the tabletop.
“It weren’t no sin, though, not a raindrop’s worth.
They traced the family back to New Orleans
where a white Frenchman married a slave woman,
giving our family Nigerian blood.”

“Our family?” the young man asked, stunned out of hurt.

She grinned, triumphant. She’d nicked away the words
nursed inside his I-ought-to-go-eat-worms.

“Your relatives deny it’s true,” she said.
“People in that bigoted town saw twins
downtown, a boy and girl, and slurred their hate
in spit-fulls, but it wasn’t sin at all.
It was human spinning generations
into a mix that makes humanity.”

She looked at him again. “The relatives
Will kill me if they know I’ve told that tale.”

Inside the small, dark room, I look at her,
Into her eyes. She doesn’t look at me.
Alive inside her emptiness, old age
An eraser, she doesn’t know I’m here.

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April 11, 2015 · 10:04 am

Four Black Swans

a Spenserian Sonnet

by Thomas Davis

Four swans, crow-feather black, fly low above
The lake’s ice, white with tints of apple green.
Upon a red roof ravens, croaking of
The way the blue-black of their feather’s sheen
Swift shadows on the snow’s white shining, preen
Into a circle, stirring whispering winds
That cause white wisps to pirouette, careen
Across the fields as daylight slowly ends.

A black cat tops a hill and then descends
Into a field where fourteen cats have made
A ring beneath a full moon; each pretends
The others aren’t as eyes glow green as jade —

The wind blows cold; the silver moon is bright
As black swans fly into the spell-bound night.

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March 13, 2015 · 8:03 am

Sitting on a Bench Waiting for the End of Winter

by Thomas Davis

Time hides in words spoke on the radio,
Inside newspaper columns gray with print.
The young girl, in the winter, watched the flow
Of snow wisps on the lake, her dreams intent
Upon the booming chunks of gleaming ice
That spring would heave on shore, great, white walls, cold
In spite of how the sun thawed sacrifice
From frozen ground and hazed the air with gold.

The young girl took her radio outside
And read the paper sitting on a bench
As winter waited for the moon-stirred tide
To free warm waters from its icy clench.

The young girl waited on her bench for spring
When she and ice and all the world would sing.

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