By Thomas Davis
When I dipped the doodle,
the universe roared back.
I tried to roar at the universe’s roar,
but the sound I made was so weak
it didn’t even register
above the sounds gravity wells make
in the deepest space
where vacuum eliminates all sound.
At that point I felt like a rooster
crowing on a fence as the sun almost rises,
so filled with myself
I had to dodge the farmer’s shout
as he yelled at me to at least wait
until the sun actually rose
before making a damn fool of myself.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
When we lived in Continental Divide, New Mexico, one of the many glories of the area where we lived at the foot of the Zuni Mountains were the great hummingbirds that were in the area from spring to fall. Sometimes in the pinion trees outside our house, hundreds of hummingbirds gathered and then dive bombed, perched, and hovered around the red feeders that Ethel filled multiple times a day. Gold, green, brown, and red flashed in the special New Mexico light as a celebration of life and living darted here and there all over our yard and into the field where horses were grazing out the back window. Sometimes Ethel would go out to water the wildflower garden she kept going until winter set in through the hottest of summer days. The hummingbirds didn’t seem to have any fear of her, but buzzed within inches of her head as they dipped in and out of the spraying water. The high desert is so dry so much of the year, and you would think that life had to have an almost impossible time surviving. Yet, the hummingbirds, beautiful and raucous, were only part of what was present in this unbelievably beautiful place with its small mountains and soaring red cliffs. Birds, elk, mountain lions, mule deer, antelope, jack rabbits, and a host of other life survived among the pinion and juniper forests that spread out over the land. Sometimes we’d even have a stellar jay landing beneath our apple trees, its dramatic crown and blue fire startling as it strutted in the small shade. This was hummingbird heaven–a place where we could sit in our living room as a fiery sunrise blazed on the eastern horizon and watched dawn glint off hummingbird wings.
Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, Thomas Davis
by Thomas Davis
At the Door County Published Author Book Fair last weekend, I was amazed. Four different people came up and told me that In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams was the best book they have ever read. One person told me that The Prophecy of the Wolf was their favorite book. Ethel’s new book, The Woman and the Whale, was also popular, especially with her pastel on the cover, and, I suspect, outsold any other poetry book at the fair.
I remember spending so many years writing and writing and having absolutely no luck at all. If either Ethel and I had sold five books at that point in our lives, we would have been so excited that we would have probably floated into the air and shined more brightly than the sun. These days those days seem like a distant past, but this blog was established partially because we both wanted readers. Our beloved son Kevin (Alazanto) Davis had died, and we felt lost in a bewilderment of emotions. When we started getting readers and then more readers, some as eminent as John Looker, the wonderful English poet, we started to believe in our writing with more optimism in our spirits.
Both of us have always written from childhood on. Ethel’s art and poetry has always been a magic part of who she is. I published my first poem in The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado during my first year at Mesa College. With Richard Brenneman, I had also helped put together a small poetry journal in Grand Junction called The Rimrock Poets Magazine that included work by Ethel. Sometimes during those years, a poem would appear in a literary journal or magazine, but those were rare, rather than common instances, even though Ethel was, and clearly is, a major, major talent as a poet.
Not long after founding this blog, Ethel decided we would publish her first book using the new ability to self publish. I Sleep Between the Moons of New Mexico was quickly followed up by White Ermine Across Her Shoulders. I kept trying to get published with little success until I wrote the epic poem, The Weirding Storm (a book that I still think is perhaps some of my best writing), which was published by Bennison Press in Great Britain. By then our blogging friend, John Looker, had introduced me to Bennison Press, and I took a wild chance and sent the manuscript to Deborah Bennison, the publisher.
I love selling books to people person to person at book fairs and book events at book stores and other places. I suspect my father’s spirit gave me that love when he had us boys work at the grocery store he and my mother ran for all the years we were at home. I wish I had some skill at marketing beyond that skill. Still, these days I feel like I have arrived as a writer, especially in the Sturgeon Bay area where we now live and the part of New Mexico where we used to live. What a wonderful joy that has become in my life.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
James Janko is one of the most significant authors in the United States. His newest novel, Wired, is on pre-order now. I’ve ordered it. When he wrote to me telling me that he thought Ethel was one of the most important poets in the world, he directed me to a review he’d written about her latest book of Poetry, The Woman and the Whale. I couldn’t agree with him more. I think a superb writer recognizes superb writing and is a wonderful judge of what he reads.
Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Daivs, published in Letter on the Horizon’s Poem
Once, when the creek
had swelled its banks in spring,
and I had run to meet its new boundaries
to build a raft
that could carry me down the Little Sandy
towards lands unknown,
I was sidetracked by a patch
of blue and yellow violets—
too many to let go unnoticed,
found among the wet and shady places—
and I forgot about the countries unseen.
And in fist-fulls I came running,
sharing them with you—
and you received them well,
arranging them in glass jars,
teaching me to love
the spring beauties and things,
the funny-faced Holstein calves,
and the timid chickadees
who came in December
to snatch your winter’s crumbs.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books
By Ethel Mortenson Davis
At dusk I found myself hurrying through the glacial forest.
The air was warm and humid, but the clay dust cool on my feet.
I was climbing the high trail to the footbridge
that crossed the black granite waters.
The daylight was fading.
The moss-covered boulders looked like giants strewn
by some ancient glacier eons ago.
As the cold air rose around my legs,
multi-colored shells of snails crisscrossed the large tree trunks.
Water trickled down everywhere — through the moss carpet
thick with the red mushroom.
I had come here before, hoping to resolve a riddle,
but now I had a disease within my body and needed help.
Finally I reached the bridge, black and strong,
made with spaces between the floor planks wide enough
to see the great height at which I was.
The black river below looked like a black granite ribbon
glistening in the dim light.
Across the bridge I could see a clearing through the trees.
In the clearing was a large crowd of people.
Their faces were as warm as their hands.
Nightingale whispered:
These are people that have helped you
in some way throughout your life.
Then it was night.
As I went back across the bridge
the moon was beginning to shine on the water,
but within me
I felt as if the sun was beginning to rise.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
By Thomas Davis
I’ve been considering the old snake lately. You know,
the one that got humanity thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
He, I wouldn’t call him an “it”,
convinced Eve that humans would become like God
if only they would eat of the fruit of knowledge.
When Eve ate, Adam followed,
and the two of them left the Garden feeling naked.
Our current old snake is rather pedestrian comparatively.
He believes he has been divinely blessed,
but God doesn’t really come into that.
What he seems to really want,
as he sort of said,
is for the world’s leaders to come and “kiss my ass.”
To achieve his goal,
he throws tariffs around like confetti
and then partially pulls them back,
crowing Victory! Victory!
while the leaders kowtow to him, buying time,
while they work behind his back
to reorder the world in a way
that benefits him and hurts the clown
that will always be a threat to him
as long as he’s able to spit poison
into the lives they have expected to live.
Snakes slither on the ground
while lifting their heads up in the air, of course,
so, our old snake doesn’t see what’s happening,
not really. He’s blessed.
In the meantime,
the richest country in the history of the world
faces the dystopian nightmare
our old snake has said we’re already living inside,
stoking grievance and division up as strongly as he can.
Those that have bitten into his apple
bless his blessedness,
and the rest of us keep looking around,
wondering how anyone can claim
the country’s strengths are a flaming mass of disaster
even as we are being overwhelmed by the disasters
the old snake is gleefully making.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
By Thomas Davis, after reading a poem by Standing Feather
I saw the great bear in the forest,
noisily rambling through the brush.
Myths were flaking off black fur
and floating into the air
as eternity kept receding into the sky
just out of reach of what was floating
upward, away from the bear.
The sky darkened, daylight to dusk,
dusk to a night sky
flowing silver with the Milky Way overhead,
the song of the stars a silence
spread over the earth in glory.
Then I saw the bear in the sky,
small points of stars,
once a beautiful maiden
that angered the goddess Hera,
now a constellation shining in the heavens.
The forest danced,
trees shadows lengthened by starlight,
leaves and branches fluttered
as the night wind blew softly,
softly beneath the great bear
rambling overhead in the sky.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Thomas Davis
is on the roll of rolls.
I mean, tariffs are terrifying the world as Mr. Trump trumps his ego
with a paroxysm of actions that have Americans checking their wallets
and the rest of the world wondering who unlocked Pandora’s box this time.
But don’t worry,
Putin’s not worried.
Russia wasn’t hit with a single tariff.
After all, they haven’t signed on to the cease fire Mr. Trump said they’d sign,
and what’s happened?
The PPP has come out with excuses piled on excuses,
and the bombs have continued to blow up schools, hospitals, and power plants,
and Russian soldiers have continued to die
as they inch forward on Ukrainian soil,
and NATO is scared to death it’s collapsing
as Trump fumes about his allies and knows Putin is his best friend.
There was a time when the GOP was a stalwart against Communism.
The Red Menace was a plague that had to be stopped!
There was even a time when Dwight Eisenhower
stood as solid as a giant
and took on Facism worldwide and beat it
and then joined Churchill in decrying the evils of the Russian Empire.
I remember all that. Don’t you?
Eisenhower was once the President and the leader of the GOP.
But that’s old history now.
The PPP is in charge.
They have the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives,
and Mr. Trump won a landslide by the skin of the skin of his teeth,
although he denies the latter part of that statement—
and don’t worry.
The stock market is collapsing,
a recession, or maybe stagflation, that strange beast, is around the corner,
and the entire world wonders what kind of new enemy has arisen in the west,
but the PPP is assuring us we can trust in Trump.
After all, Mr. Putin says we can.
I tell you, the PPP, even as it repeats endlessly strings of lies,
never leads anyone astray!
Filed under I ought to go eat worms, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
By Thomas Davis
In the midst of all the insanity in this country right now, yesterday I was sent news about one of the great leaders of the tribal colleges and universities movement in the United States and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education movement worldwide.
I am walking through the wilderness.
Time has twisted on me.
I keep wondering who I am
as my hair grows white,
my bones ache more fiercely.
Ron His Horse Is Thunder is gone?
Gone where?
To the top of a tall mountain
where clouds of snow-dust blow
into a sky so blue
it’s not a dome but a song
that lasts forever and ever?
I imagine him lean as he rides a golden stallion
running with a herd of wild golden stallions,
his face alive with the spirit of Sitting Bull,
with the fire of the tribal colleges in his black hair
as it streams backward in the wind,
as the colleges bloom out of the prairie, in the deep woods, in the shadows of great mountains, in the high deserts, and beside the Pacific Ocean
into history, the meaning of history.
I could tell you stories.
How he became a tribal chairman
and then came to an AIHEC board meeting
where tribal college Presidents
treated him like a rock star,
cheering every time he took a breath.
How he walked out on a narrow runway in Albuquerque
dressed only in a loin cloth,
holding a spear as old as the stories
told around campfires on cold nights.
Dressed only in a loin cloth,
his legs and abs shining.
How he and I argued for a different funding stream
for the colleges as the eyes of Presidents glared
and linked us into visions
of a future where Native men and women
dance and sing as the drum of the future thunders
and wildflowers bloom every time a foot touches ground.
And now the news.
The old leaders, the beautiful people, my friends,
those who would sit in cheap motel rooms
and fiercely debate for hours
as they conjured alive a movement
that is changing history,
are fading, fading, fading.
The fire in their eyes,
the power of their gestures,
the song of their voices
disappearing, disappearing, disappearing.
And who will remember where they have walked?
Who will know the force of who they were?
They created a movement.
They fashioned it out of dreams,
out of old bar rooms and trailer houses
and abandoned buildings that should have been condemned.
They did! They did! All of them together!
And now,
an email. An email!
A technology that wasn’t invented yet
when the tribal colleges first came to be.
It says that Ron His Horse Is Thunder,
a man so glorious they put his glory
on national posters and posted them all over the country,
is gone.
Nothing more than that.
That’s what it says.
How can that possibly have any meaning at all?
I feel the wilderness around me,
time twisting,
my spirit feeling how it felt
whenever I heard Ron His Horse Is Thunder laughing.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
fourwindowspress 