a photograph by Sonja Bingen
Tag Archives: house
Carver of Birds
He sank into the raven’s eyes.
Their surface sheen reflected snow
Back at the whiteness of the skies.
A concave warp of vertigo
Unshrouded mice in tunnels cached
From clawing eyes that beaked black wings
Above the scurrying that snatched
Blood past the raven’s ravenings.
Inside his heart black feathers stirred
Into his hands, his human life.
A crucible croaked from the bird,
Its blood inside his blood a knife
That tunneled black rimmed raven eyes
Into a cedar block that pulsed with wings
And raucous swells of clawing cries
That made the forest’s stillness sing.
He shrugged his spirit from the bird
And left it listening to snow.
He walked through darkness, undeterred
By failing light, the silver glow
Of moonlight through the limbs of trees.
Outside the house he stopped and stared
At birds he’d carved into the eaves.
In rooms, on fence posts wings were flared
As birdsong choired cacophony
Into the silence of the night.
The house moved, spirit-fantasy
Of birds eternally in flight.
Note: This poet is a companion to “Encounter with a Gray Morph Owl.” The idea came from an essay by Norbert Blei in “Door Way, the People in the Landscape.”
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
Shell
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I can’t remember when
the old man’s house became unliving,
when the closed-off rooms became closed-off
from life and put on the shelf,
unusable like the clock in the attic,
the meaning all but gone.
Like the grandchildren’s forgotten names–
who once were through his loins,
now faded memories–
where once the sea breezes of June
and August swept down the hills
and through the house where
now
the shell of a man sits,
a seashell washed up on the shoreline.
Life has long gone out,
and the smell of the air is overpowering,
and I turn away
because it is the smell of death.
The fresh sea breezes
blow down hills
sweet with the wild rose.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Answer
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I’ve been looking
for someone
to take our hand,
but no one does.
Louise Erdrich says
that in grief you must
take your own hand.
So we must
take our own
and step between the paleness
that camps all around:
In the trees,
in the sunlight,
and in the house.
We must take
our own.
from White Ermine Across Her Shoulders, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Copyright © 2011, available at bn.com.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
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