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
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
Filed under Art, Photography
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
