Tag Archives: poems

September 26, 2026 · 2:55 pm

Listening

6/2/04

Carrie Billy just sent me a lost poem from the past, which is below. She is moving to Navajo Tech to take up a job that I absolutely loved, Provost. I am so looking forward to when she arrives on campus. In the meantime, she has been packing and trying to decide what to do with tons of stuff accumulated over decades of living in DC.

Al Kuslikis is something of a packrat, she tells me, and the two of them found the following poem in my scrawled handwriting in the stuff he had at the DC house. Al is a wonderful friend, and I think I scrawled this out at a bar while Al had one of his usual beers that is next to Union Station in DC, although my memory can’t be trusted fully.

For years I wrote poems on napkins, or scratch paper, and on anything handy while I was with people from the early years of the tribal college movement and then handed one of the people with me what I had just written. In my book, Meditations on Ceremonies of Beginnings, published by Tribal College Press https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GD88R99R?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback, I describe how Marjane Ambler, the former Editor of the Tribal College Journal, found out what I was doing, yelled at me in a crowded Irish DC restaurant, and then made me promise to make sure I told everyone I gave a poem to that they were to send her a copy. The copies she collected over the years became Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings.

Of course, several of the poems (who knows how many) were not saved, and I kept on writing the poems over the years and giving them away.

This is one of those poems that happened that has long been lost, though Carrie and Al have now rescued it:

When you throw a stone into a pond

And see concentric circles flowing outward in the water,

You see the conversation that has occurred

Between the stone and water.

I listen,

The voices of humans in the evening waft into air,

Eventually being absorbed by the earth’s great silence.

I listen

And hear how human voices are absorbed into sounds

Made by crickets, stones, water, sky.

I listen

And try to find the center of the universe, meaning.

In the deep woods a frog croaks.

I see an elder, an Indian man, dancing,

Alone in the early spring,

A full moon broken by the dark trunks of white pine,

Dancing,

Trying to bring balance back into the world.

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September 20, 2026 · 3:57 pm

The Accomplishment of Ethel Mortenson Davis as a Poet

In the latest issue of Poetry Highland, a Chinese/English bilingual journal of poetry edited by Yingcal Xu, Ethel Mortenson Davis’s photo, along with the photos of the other poets in issue 5, appears on the back cover. For several years now, Ethel, who is, of course, the love of my life, has had her poems translated into Chinese through journals associated with Xu.

When I first read Ethel’s poems when I was twenty years old and attending Mesa Junior College in Grand Junction, Colorado, what struck me was how powerful they were as they explored themes that seemed to be much larger than those I was attempting to imbed into my efforts at becoming a poet. The intensity of the images

For You

You

smell like

wild snow

or

of trees

that hug

the earth.

Turn your head.

            you can hear

            the moss

            cling to the sides

            of trees

            and the sun

            make your hair

            the color

            of red honey.

Not there.

Leave that hill

unnoticed.

stunned me. That intensity, as well as what I thought of as “their originality,” seemed so powerful that I wondered if I could ever become half the poet this young woman, the sister of someone I knew, already was. “make your hair/the color/of red honey.” Who would have ever seen that?

We have been married for close to 59 years now, and the truth is that my amazement at her accomplishments as a poet has never ceased. She has published eight volumes of poetry at this point, and she is working on a new book. We are in our eighties now, but her ability to write poetry or create wonderful pastels has never flagged during all these years.

This is the third essay I have written about her poetry. In the last essay I showed how her poetry has its roots in Imagism, Chinese poetry, and even the philosophy driving beat poetry, expecting readers to construct the meaning of the poems by pairing disparate images and connecting those images to what she is expressing without directly saying what she means.

This poetic technique is becoming increasingly common in the AI age, although it is an ancient technique as I showed in my last Ethel essay. In the Navajo poet Sherwin Bitsui’s book Flood Song, for example, images that, on the surface, have little relationship with each other create poems that are almost surrealistic in their juxtapositions. The poems are always grounded in the natural world of Navajoland—the high desert, mountains, canyons, buttes, flora, fauna, and geology—but reading Bitsui requires the reader to reach beyond logic to find meaning in the wholeness, sometimes violence, of intense, clashing images.

Just realizing that when you approach an Ethel Mortenson Davis poem you have to look for more than what appears on the surface really doesn’t begin to explain the importance of what she has accomplished. The work of a lot of contemporary poets, although it is truly valuable and worth the effort to read and explore, leaves too many people, at least in American culture, feeling that they can’t really understand poetry—so why bother?

The majority of Ethel’s readers don’t normally have that reaction. Almost everything she writes is easily accessible to almost all readers, even young people. Our daughter Sonja teaches fifth and sixth graders at the Catholic school in Burlington, Wisconsin, and she keeps informing her mother that several students, year after year, when they do their creative writing unit, just “love” her mother’s poetry.

An early poem like “Spotted Pony”

The Spotted Pony

When the last leaf

has touched the earth

unseen,

and the sky is bright

like a spotted pony,

spring touches me

with her warm, soft muzzle,

exploring me with moist breath

and ballooning nostrils,

questioning me

with quick nudges

and rude pushes,

until I jump on her back

and ride full gallop

against the wind,

holding on tight

to her warm, round belly.

can be read by anyone, and the image of spring as a spotted pony creates a metaphor that is immediately accessible. The exuberance of the poem jumps off the page. Admittedly, there is more to the poem than just the image it presents and the emotion it engenders. What is Ethel saying about the nature of the earth, spring, and humanity and our relationship to the earth? I think that’s buried in the meaning of the poem even though I am sure none of Sonja’s students think about the poem, if they read it, that way. Nor do the majority of her readers.

In Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica,” as I pointed out in my last essay about Ethel’s poetry, he says, “A poem should not mean / But be.” What MacLeish is getting at is the idea that poetry is not a mere collection of words when it reaches its apex. It is not about ideas or facts or arguments. Nor should it be taken literally. It should not be utilitarian, teaching or persuading or having a specific purpose or aim.

Instead, transcendent poetry achieves a timelessness that relates humanity and the natural world across time through a poem that is a work of art like a Leonardo da Vinci painting or a Rodin sculpture or any human effort that exists within space but is also like a singularity, a unique point where rules, equations, or even predictions break down. It is a living “be.” It is. It is a singular work of art.

Again, this is really an ancient equation. Both Chinese and Japanese poetry strive for exactly this kind of ideal. Certainly some of the ancient poetry of the Western tradition, like Beowulf or the Finnish epic Kalevala, or any number of poems that seem like stories but transcend the time that they depict, are living “be” in MacLeish’s formulation.

In a talk given outside at Norbert Blei’s old chicken shack at the Write On Door County writing center in Door County recently, Al DeGenova, a contemporary poet and the editor of After Hours literary magazine, said that Blei’s theory of poetry, drawn from the writings of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, among other beat poets, was that poems should come from a trance-like state where the poem arises from an unconscious space in the poet. It should touch the ancient springs of experience that echo into the poet’s contemporary life.

I have always thought that the best poems Ethel has written over the years exemplify MacLeish’s idea that a poem must be. They seem to come from a place inside her that is not drawn from conscious thought.

A poem like Emily Dickinson’s “I Could Not Stop for Death” goes beyond what most of us think about when we consider mortality and its role in our lives. The themes in the poem stack up into almost a hymn: the personification of death as a courteous gentleman rather than something terrifying lying ahead of all of us; the carriage journey as a symbol of the progression of life, passing children at play, fields of grain, and the setting sun; the depiction of a grave as a home; then the idea of centuries feeling shorter than a single day.

In a different way, Ethel’s poem, “Rainwater,” is every bit as expansive even though it is not one of her most noticed poems:

Rainwater

All night

I heard the dog

barking for someone

to help him.

Over the week

his barks became weaker,

until they ceased.

Today the rains

came gently, slowly.

I had to adjust

the rain gutter outside

and got my hair wet.

Rain in the desert

is a cleansing,

renewing

experience,

cleaning what man

leaves in all the earth.

Passing the hall mirror,

I noticed my hair

shiny, soft, and curly.

I remember when you

ran outside to catch

the rainwater.

You said it made your hair

so beautiful and shiny,

cleaning it

like nothing else.

Today, in the field,

the vultures are circling.

The ominous note in the last line, “the vultures are circling,” is contrasted with the gentle rain and getting the poet’s hair wet and the address to you, someone the poet obviously cares about, and the reflection about rainwater making hair “so beautiful and shiny,/cleaning it/like nothing else.” All of this is inside the frame of “the dog/barking for someone/to help him./Over the week/his barks became weaker,/until they ceased.” I’ll let the reader decipher the multiple meanings derived from the juxtaposed images. This is not a particularly comfortable poem. Nor is “I Could Not Stop for Death” by Dickinson.

Ethel’s poem is anchored in an image of a particular moment in time. Dickinson’s and Ethel’s poems are obviously dramatically different. But both, in the end, seem as if they are delving beyond conscious reality into something deeper, perhaps a vision drawn from what Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious,” that place in human experience that reaches into all of it and becomes enlightenment.

None of the really serious poets, despite their cultivated reputations, are sunshine poets. Ethel and I saw a documentary about Mary Oliver’s life recently and were shocked by how difficult a life she led and how much she marched to a different drummer. That life and her alternative lifestyle were the reality of who she was. She has had the reputation of a modern-day transcendentalist, in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, or maybe a mixture of both. Still, much of her poetry has shadowy themes of predation, death, and trauma.

Similarly, the public perception of Robert Frost as the white-haired grandfather poet who uses nature to teach us the wonder of nature and the human condition ignores a whole body of his most brilliant poetry. A poem like “Home Burial,” where a husband perceives his wife’s concentration on the grave mounds of their children out of an upstairs window, explores the depth of isolation of two people close to each other who could not be further apart—and is really cold-eyed in its depiction of a certain reality. Or there is always “The Witch of Coos,” which tells the eerie and unsettling story of bones rising from the cellar and getting locked in the attic, exploring guilt and the terror of secrets within a household.

In some ways, my favorite book of Ethel’s is A Letter on the Horizon’s Poem (Kelsay Books), which starts in darkness. A poem like:

Winter Soldier[1]

They have come home

to hate war,

the winter soldiers,

after being in Iraq.

Some had fun

killing civilians.

Some did not like

killing them,

picking them off

as they walked

along the streets,

or rode their bicycles,

or drove in their cars.

Maybe, if we stay

long enough,

we’ll get rid of

all the Iraqis.

Blackwater convoys

came up a one-way street

the wrong way.

Cars coming down

tried to pull off

and were shot, people

killed in their cars.

A doctor and his mother

were in one of the cars.

Blackwater shot the young man

while the mother

clung to her son,

but the car did not stop

so Blackwater fired

a missile into the car.

It became an inferno.

Both mother and son

fused together.

Seventeen civilians

were killed

[1] Stories from returning Iraqi soldiers against the Iraq War at Silver Spring, Maryland, March 15, 2008.

This is a poem that has an edge. It is political, contemporary, and still manages to reflect on humanity and the terror it has created and is still creating. The final image is not comfortable for anyone to see in their mind’s eye.

The entire book moves from darkness to the earth. Animals and landscape saturate nearly every poem she has written—rattlesnakes, wolves, bears, horses, rabbits, dragonflies, birds—and in the next section after darkness, nature is dominant. Nature becomes an enabler of our humanness.

Sweetgrass

It is a time

when the smell

of sweetgrass

hangs heavy

in the ear

of summer,

when light lingers long

in the night,

and we let go of

what is not right in the world,

when we drift

across the tall grasses

to where fireflies

are whispering

to each other.

In this small pocket

of summer,

the deer

have finally

let themselves

be seen.

Then the book moves to healing, a section that contains some of her most powerful poems:

The Healer

“…you have been yourself at the edge of the Deep Canyon and have come back unharmed” An Elder of the San Juan Pueblo. 1959. V. Laski. Seeking Life.

“I was invisible” An Asiatic Eskimo. 1980. D. Cloutier. Spirit Spirit, Shaman Songs.

In the snowy canyons

you came to me

as an eagle

and whispered

(in almost audible sounds)

“the key to the secret

of healing. . .”

For my wounds

had gone beyond wounds

and had festered

into deep holes

in my sides,

and gangrene had set in,

but, in a whisper,

you came and said,

“you have the keys within you.

You are the stars

in the starry night.

You are the source

at the mouth of rivers.

You have the medicine

to heal

already in your bones.”

And my wounds became

as faint as the sound

of feathers,

as pale as the ringed moon.

And the healer

came to me

in the face of the wolf.

She came

and nodded to me

with her deep intelligence,

and her eyes told me,

“your spirit is strength.

Your force is as great

as volcanoes,

for your goodness prevails

over the dark;

your goodness

has brought you out

of the deep canyon.”

And again the healer

came to me.

This time as a bear,

a joyous white bear

with great white paws,

and she told me,

“you were invisible,

but now I see you.

You have gone

to the edge of the great canyon

but have come back

unharmed.

“And now your laughter

will become

as mountainous as thunder,

and your tears

will be the tears of glory!”

I tell you.

I have put my ear

to the great Earth

and have felt your presence.

A Letter on the Horizon’s Poem moves through a seven-book structure (Darkness → War → Earth → Remembering a Son → Healing → Life → Endings) and traces a deliberate arc: from personal and historical trauma, through grounding in the natural/spiritual world and grief for a child, toward healing, ordinary life, and finally a clear-eyed reckoning with mortality. Seven themes dominate the collection: war and human cruelty; the natural world as mirror, witness, and teacher; indigenous spirituality and healing traditions; healing and resilience; aging, mortality, and endings; environmental loss; the poet’s own solitude and vocation.

When I’ve written an essay on Ethel’s poetry in the past, I’ve analyzed individual poems, the traditions the poems belong to, the techniques she used, and how all of that ended up fashioning the meanings she imbedded into what she’d written. What I wanted to try to accomplish with this essay was an analysis of how the body of her work is much more substantive than what could be explored by focusing on any one poem or even small groups of poetry.

By emphasizing A Letter on the Horizon’s Poem, I don’t mean to deemphasize her other books. Each individual volume has its own strength, as is true of almost every serious poet who has created a substantial body of work. In A Gatherer of Days and Lights and Secret Places, she pairs her poems with 12 full-color photographs of pastels, giving that particular volume a sense of the breadth of her accomplishment as both poet and artist. Her success in the Chinese/English journals comes from a lifetime of producing, since the days when she was a teenager, poem after poem and art work after art work that, at least to her husband, adds up to a significant artistic accomplishment. What more can any artist in any medium wish to achieve?

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August 8, 2026 · 3:57 pm

The Meaning Between the Images: Ethel Mortenson Davis and the Poetrics of Juxtaposition

I suppose I shouldn’t be writing essays about Ethel Mortenson Davis’s poetry.  After all, she’s been my wife for close to 59 years now.  But what I’ve noticed over the years is that too many people, though obviously not everyone, sees a poem of hers and feels a certain spark of delight at the image it sparks in their head.

A short poem she just wrote (so many of her poems are short) brought that to the front of my thoughts:

Pollen-Sacs

A frenzied flock of thrushes,

thin and desperately looking for food,

left us worried and wondering.

A bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs

attached to his legs

struggles to fly homeward—your eyes flash.

Like so much of her poetry, you can read this poem, or better yet, listen to Ethel read it out loud, and you can see the two images:  The starving flock of thrushes and the bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs.  But the question is, what is in the poem beyond the images?

Years ago, even before we were first married in Grand Junction, Colorado, I learned to distrust my first reaction to both her poetry and her art.  What you see is inevitably there, but if you leave what’s there at that, you probably are reacting to what’s there rather than understanding the depth of what’s there and the meaning.

In this particular poem, it’s easy to read the first stanza, see that it is about thrushes frenzied in their desperate search for food, go to the second stanza and see the word “struggles” and assume that it is a poem about creatures that are struggling, maybe from the Canadian or western U.S. wildfires so prominent in the world today.

Certainly, there is a layer in the poem that suggest that global climate change might be affecting the thrushes who are in a state where they are desperately looking for food, but pollen sacs are larvae food, providing essential protein, fats, and vitamins that baby bees need to grow.  A bumble bee struggling to carry two of them attached to his legs is not struggling in the sense the frenzied flock of thrushes are.  The bee has collected abundance and are struggling to get what it has gathered of richness found inside flowers it has visited home.

Another element in the poem is that the pollen in the pollen sacs is essential to life on the planet earth since, as the bee flies from flower to flower, the pollen brushes off on the next flower, helping with the pollination process that is necessary to so much food production around the world as well as the diversity of plant-life that in turn feeds into the diversity of insects and animal-life that keep the entire natural world vibrant.

Therefore, the poem is constructed of a parallelism, one image juxtaposed with another.  This creates a complexity of meanings that, admittedly, demands some understanding of science but creates an even deeper level of poetic meaning, exploring all kinds of issues overwhelming our current world.

Therefore, the poem does contain an implied warning.  The thrushes desperate for food leave us wondering why they are desperate?  What has caused that in a world that flows from the bee as part of the chain of events that creates diversity and. even throughout so much of history, fecundity in the natural world?  Are they migrants from wildfire or severe drought or some other disaster?  The poem doesn’t give us a clue.  It just gives us the image of a fact.

But it also gives us a lesson about bees and the larger importance of diversity in a time when the idea of protecting diversity found in either the natural world or human populations is under attack. 

The bee with pollen sacs so heavy that it struggles to make it home causes your eyes to flash.  The bee is a symbol of hope.  It is flying home to feed the larvae that is going to propagate the hive into the next generation.

That hope is contrasted with the desperate flock of thrushes.

What looks like a simple image or even set of images is not always simple, especially in poetry and art, especially Ethel’s poetry and art.

The Chinese Tradition of Poetry

At the heart of what Ethel tries to do in so much of her poetry does flow from two major sources:  the major one is the traditional Chinese tradition of poetry where concrete images, juxtaposition, suggestion, and meaning are generated through the relationship between images.  There needs to be an intuitive leap by the reader to take the images, juxtaposition(s), and suggestions presented by the poem to discover the meaning of the poem. 

In this sense, the aesthetic convergence of a poem, or even a work of art, can be much more interesting, and an act of discovery, as direct influence.  In Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica”, he claimed that a poem should mean, not say, although that’s admittedly not the exact phrase from the poem. Poetry is not generally deductive science, making hypotheses and then testing those until hard truths are either proven or disproven.  It is the art of seeing the universe in a blade of grass, which comes out of Walt Whitman’s line, ““I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars…”

The Imagistic Tradition of Poetry

The second major continuity in Ethel’s body of work is the modern imagistic tradition starting with Ezra Pound.  Pound had several ideas about what a poem should be when he first started writing about imagism.  According to Pound, a poem should:

 Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

 Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

 As regarding rhythm: compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

In applying this sense of poetic construction, Pound defined an image, which should, at least in his view, be at the heart of modern poetry, as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  That means that an image in poetry is made up of:

 what we literally see;

 an emotional response;

 an intellectual recognition;

 associations that aren’t explicitly stated;

 relationships to other images.

In Ethel’s poem, “Pollen-Sacs,” the title leads us to notice that this is the central image.  The thrushes give us hunger, desperation, uncertainty and perhaps ecological disturbance.  The bumblebee gives us effort, abundance, fertility, reproduction and continuity.

But the poem doesn’t explain those things. It presents them.  The reader experiences the relationship between them.

The Value of Empty Space

I want to end this essay by talking briefly about Chinese art.  Traditional Chinese landscape painting often isn’t about reproducing a landscape photographically. It creates a relationship among elements—mountain, water, tree, mist, human figure, empty space—so that the viewer enters the painting and completes the experience.

Even in her abstract pastels and paintings, Ethel usually tries to do the same thing.  This is part of what relates her poetry to her art.

In her poetry she gives us the image (or thing in Pound’s formulation).  In the case of “Pollen-Sacs” we have the thrushes and the bumble bee.  Then she leaves a conceptual space between them.  This is designed to lead us into first a visual and emotional reaction, then to a question (why are the images so different from each other?), which leads, hopefully, to thinking about the poem’s meaning.

Conclusion

I suspect that this is what I have been learning from Ethel for nearly 59 years. I have learned not to rush to explain what I see in her poems or paintings either to myself or others. I have learned to stay with the image for a while, to look at what is there and then to pay attention to what is not there and to let others discover what they can find and understand for themselves.

The meaning is often in that space.

In “Pollen-Sacs,” the thrushes and the bumblebee never meet. Ethel doesn’t tell us what connects them. She doesn’t tell us whether the thrushes are victims of a changing world, whether the bee represents hope, or whether the two images are part of some larger warning about the fragile web of life. She gives us the images and leaves the space between them open.

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August 3, 2026 · 8:58 pm

Dance, Laugh, and Sing

By Thomas Davis

We dance.  We dance! Into infinity
And laugh and sing our time-bound life of songs
As beauty swirls in butterflies and great, wide plains 
That swarm with wildbeest that move and throng

Into time’s boundaries as if time is a myth
That doesn’t limit life’s continuance
Through generations that will spin and move 
And dance, yes dance! Into the issuance

Of what must be forever true and real
Though death forever brings its day of doom
When heartbeats fail and flowers lose their bloom
And every one of us is set into our tomb.

So, dance! Dance as infinity wheels stars
Across the skies and gifts us love and joy
Inside the room we live inside each day,
Dance!  Love!  Be what you most enjoy.


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March 5, 2026 · 1:01 pm

Thought-Ship, A Poem Launched on Time’s River

A Review of an Epic-length, Unpublished Masterpiece by the English poet, Nick Moore

Nick Moore has long been one of my favorite poets. He’s one of the few poets I personally know that has spent the years necessary to write epic-length poems. I first got to know him at wonderful blog, https://gonecyclingagain.wordpress.com/ that contains a plethora of traditional verse, especially sonnets. Not too long ago he sent me a long, unpublished poem, that I have written about below. Nick has not published the poem, though he ought to. Still, I wanted to note in fourwindowspress.com that there is a wonderful poem that needs to see the light of day.

When I first started reading Nick Moore’s long poem, Thought Ship, written in the ancient Anglo-Saxon alliterative form that is rarely attempted by contemporary poets, the first thing that came into my head was an experience that had happened several years ago at the Dickenson Poetry Series in Ephraim, Wisconsin.  Ethel Mortenson Davis, my poet-artist wife, and I have made an attempt to attend the Dickenson series for years, enjoying the company of Door County poets and listening to their latest work during the open mike sessions.

On this occasion my offering for the evening had been a poem using the Celtic form of the Droigneach, one of the more challenging forms ever created where lines are 9 to 13 syllables long, alliteration is spilled throughout the poem, and the last word of every line has three lines.  In the form that I had used that night I had also followed the pattern of using triple syllabic rhymes.  After reading the poem I gave a detailed explanation of the rules I’d used to write the poem. 

When the evening was over, and the poets gathered to share a glass of juice or wine and snack on delicacies spread out on a table covered with an elegant tablecloth, one of the best poets there came up to me, shaking her head.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the best poets in a county filled with admirable poets, but she told me, “I don’t know why you bother with all of that form stuff.  It’s more like torture than poetry.”

In contemporary poetry, of course, a work like Thought Ship is an anomaly.  The Anglo-Saxon alliterative form, or Old English metre, he uses to write the poem dates back to the time of Beowulf, the epic master work of that era, and earlier into ancient German and Norse poetry.  The specific form Moore uses in his poem, as he said in an email to me about the poem, is made up of “two half-lines with a caesura, which I’ve emphasized with the two-column format. The alliteration should fall on the first and/or second stressed syllables of the first half -line, and the first stressed syllable of the second half-line; the fourth syllable can do whatever it pleases.”[1]

I can imagine a contemporary reader, coming up on the poem for the first time, would automatically shake their head at all of this and say, this is more like torture than poetry.  Making the challenge of reading the poem even more uncomfortable is Moore’s use of Old English, “ān, tƿēġen,” etc. in the headings for each stanza of a 9,000+ word poem.  Contemporary poets rarely reach back into the history of poetry and so nakedly integrate ancient language into a current poem.

Then there is this ancient convention of placing lines into commons so that the poem can be read horizontally or diagonally:

So. Send for the shipwright                              Summon him hither

The flood-tide is flowing                                 Deep forces are stirring

I bring a commission                                       A craft like no other.

A thing never dreamed of:                               Thought-Ship, I name her;

My own and mine only                                    With magic all through her

Swift-sailing and shapely                                  A sea-sword, a wave-shield

To brave storms and bear me                          Beyond this day’s troubles

Far out on the ocean                                        Safe over rough waters.

The craft of a production like this seems a challenge, to the least, and requires a discipline that makes little sense in a world where the moment is key, where business is more concerned with today’s performance and the quarterly report than any consideration of long-term prospects.

Most, though not all, contemporary poetry is shaped around stories of moments or the dynamics of relationships, usually, but not always, between individuals.  Power is often derived from disparate images drawn from moments, confessional histories, or acts within relationships, causing a fusion of image, symbol, emotion, and idea that explodes into meanings that seem larger, and more significant, than the content of the poem.  The poet who commented on my effort at a droigneach is a master of this contemporary approach to poetry.

Moore, of course, is pursuing something dramatically different.  This pursuit is part of what makes his poem important and should interest the most contemporary of readers.

One of C.S. Lewis’s favorite poems was The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser, the great epicist writing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England.  Spenser’s poem used language that was archaic for the times in which he lived and was based upon the great Arthurian and classical tales drawn from what was considered antiquity.  Lewis’s reaction to great poem was that what Spenser

. . . had always liked was the Middle Ages as he imagined them to have been and as they survived in his time in the pageant, the morality play, and the metrical romance. . .  [thus] he was enabled to produce a tale more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable, than any real medieval romance—to deny, in his own person, the breach between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . . .[2]

What I take from Lewis’s analysis is that sometimes poets can reach back into the past, using both language as well as form, to enrich a poem told to a contemporary audience.  Part of the sense here is that time is not a static quality that exists only at the moment when the poet sits down to write a poem.  It is, as many poets have written in many ages, an ever-flowing river as large as the universe that has places in its flowing that can be noted but is inexorable in its force toward an unseeable eternity.  By looking backward, taking the language and poetic forms of another time, Spenser, as Lewis notes, is “enabled to produce” a poem “more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable” than the model, in Spenser’s case “medieval romance,” from which it is drawn.

In his great poem, “The Seafarer,” Ezra Pound, a more modern poet, uses the same form of Old English metre used in Thought Ship, but does not use the two-column format.  Using a model from an older Old English poem of the same title, Pound also uses, like Spenser before him, some of the diction from the original poem.  The result, as is true of The Fairie Queen, is a powerful poem that exists in the context of Pound’s time, but achieves a timelessness that gives some sense of the time-river’s inexorable flow through time:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,

Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days

Hardship endured oft.

Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.[3]

Interestingly, as in The Faery Queen, Pound uses the syntax of ancient times to help heighten the sense that his poem is bringing an ancient man’s experience into a contemporary world that will also be the past as the ship the seafarer is on keeps sailing.

The reason a contemporary poet uses old, or even ancient, forms for writing a poem is not simply to show off their learning or their technical expertise.  Part of the effort comes from a sense that poetry is part craft and part art and that by mastering old forms you are paying homage to a history that has been part of humanity’s development of distinct cultures across the ages.  But there is also this other part, the one that has to do with what Spenser and Pound were tapping into in order to achieve a poetic power that is different from that achieved by the poetry of moment and relationship.  This is an attempt to reach back through time in both craft and art to produce an art that “is more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable” than what can be produced out of simply writing out of the present using the craft accessible to readers contemporary with the poet.

This sense of the time-river is central to what makes Thought Ship worth reading by contemporary readers.  Moore is not only showing technical mastery of an ancient craft, but he is using that craft to fashion a long work forged by a poet sailing from that past into his contemporary world.  He is attempting to find power in the layering of time that has built up into what is now the present, but which will, quickly enough, become the past, and he is attempting this via a “thought ship” engendered out of his reactions and complex of anxieties that help make up his every-days.

The poem itself is broken into four parts:  The Building of the Thought-Ship, The Voyages of the Thought-Ship, the Sword and the Summons, and then, finally, The Last Voyage of the Thought-Ship.  In the third stanza, þrēo, Moore specifically tells the reader why is building the thought-ship:

Place charms upon her                                        The power of the ancients

Runes of protection                                            Written in silver

Spells and enchantments                                     Spoken around her

Granting good fortune                                        Guards against ill fate.

Another way of putting this is to say that he is constructing a magic poem designed to conjure the power of the ancients to create, as he says, “Runes of protection/Spells and enchantments” in the hope of “good fortune.” 

Once the ship is built it then sets sail upon a series of voyages.  Each voyage explores different aspects of the natural world as it exists both in the contemporary world and the ancient.  The kingdom of the birds, high, cold lands, a place where horses predominate, in the company of the wily Reynard, in forests, among farms and fields, upon the waters of the world, and the seasons of the year are also explored.  Through each exploration lessons are learned, attempting to fulfill what Spenser would have said is the purpose of poetry, creating lessons of moral truth through images of great beauty.[4]

These initial voyages of the thought-ship end, leading to a time of waiting and trying to understand the real purpose behind the effort to build the ship:

The months passed in peace                    I lay, patient but watchful

Awaiting the order                                 My ordained task still unknown.

I sought solace in silence                         Solitude and reflection

Looked deep to discern                           My direction and destiny

But no road was revealed                        I was rootless and restless

No work and no will                               My word-hoard neglected.

In this period the poets prepares for a battle that he senses on the horizon, but does not really understand.  Who is the enemy?  “These phantoms and torments. . .”  He has built the thought-ship, journeyed, but he faces an unknown, unknowable future.  Inside this time between journey and battle, even his “word-hoard,” his life as a poet, is neglected.

After a time or preparation, worry, and even fear, the last voyage of the thought-ship at last comes:

When all is lost, nothing left.                   I will lay down my weapons.

I will tell one more tale                           Then take my last leaving.

Bear me then, Thought-Ship                    Beyond the world’s far rim

Set sail for the islands.                             Steer by the first star.

Inside this last section the angst felt by individual living in the contemporary world of the poet leaks into the poem and gives the rationale for the poem’s existence, ending the thought-ships voyage with the revelations generated from a poet’s craft voyage through time.

There are large themes throughout Thought Ship.  Whether your read the lines vertically or horizontally, the poet is struggling with time and himself, but time is felt in the natural world of nature where the kingdom of birds, wisdom of horses, secret of trees, the farms and fields, the world’s waters are eternal.  But there is also the theme of journey and self inside journey and how that self, waiting for a battle with the unseen forces in his psyche, survives in a world that is not “Set apart from the struggle.” 

In the end we all sail upon our own Thought-ship “Out of time, place and memory.”  We are all living “Through long, nameless ages.”

[1] January 10, 2021.

[2] Lewis, C.S. “On Reading The Faerie Queene.” IN: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Collected by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, 1998, p. 148.

[3] Quoted from Poetry Foundation, “The Seafarer by Ezra Pound,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44917/the-seafarer.  Accessed on 1/16/21.

[4] Wendling, Susan.  “The Fairy Way of Writing, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and C.S. Lewis’s “Habit of Mind,” Inklings Forever, Volume IX, 9 (2014).  Accessed at www.taylor.edu/cslewis on 1/16/21.

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March 4, 2026 · 9:39 am

Ethel Davis: Mastering Metaphor in Minimalist Poetry

By Thomas Davis

Ethel Mortenson Davis is a poet that has published eight books of poetry and been published in literary journals and anthologies. The Wisconsin Library Association named her book, Under the Tail of the Milky Way Galaxy, a significant book of poetry by a Wisconsin poet. She has also been a poet laureate for Door County, Wisconsin.

Ever since I have known Ethel, and realized that she is a better poet than I will ever be, I have been fascinated by how she can condense power and meaning into so few lines they are almost, though not quite, haiku. What brought this to the top of my mind was a poem she presented to the poetry group we attend once a month:

Pain

She pulls me from
my deepest sleep.
I tell her leave me alone
where I am happy and safe.

But she gets her way and 
stretches me to the top of
of some canyon wall
and tells me, 
this is your reality now.

The power of this poem is, at least to me, undeniable.  It expressed in 9 lines what so many people, especially as they get older and face the ravages of arthritis or other ailments, have to confront as they struggle to deal with what they cannot escape.  It also contains the yearning within the complex of pain for the happiness and safety that is still in the deepest memory of the poet inside "deepest sleep."

When Ethel first showed me what she had written, it reminded me of another powerful small poem, "blackness"

blackness
seeps
in my room.
he crawls up
onto my lap
like the uninvited guest
he always is.

i keep hoping
he’ll leave
before dinner.

originally published in her collection, A Letter on the Horizon's Poem, published by Kelsay Books.

This poem is more metaphorical, of course.  Blackness is a metaphor, but the poem again expresses what so much of humanity faces at different times in their lives and, with a touch of humor, in ten lines explores and expresses a dilemma and experience that is at the heart of all of our lives as we journey toward the inevitability central to our existence as human beings.

One of Ethel's early poems that I first read before I had met her in Grand Junction, Colorado when she drove with her sister Pat to visit her sister Lorraine helped to make me aware of what an extraordinary poet the person I was about to meet really was

White Delirium

Oh,
how the white delirium
has set in me.

Memories ache in my throat.
Sweetness stains my mouth.

I cannot forget
your eyes
that cried out to me,
the end of us!

In many ways, Ethel is an imagist poet.  Certainly the images she paints can be almost overwhelmingly powerful.  "Memories ache in my throat.". The creative force of that image is then paired with "Sweetness stains my mouth."  Then the last four lines that makes us construct the meaning out of the poem, as does the blackness poem, by giving us an image that is startling and powerful as it communicates separation and the delirium accompanying a separation that is, what?  The creator of delirium or the result of a relationship that was delirious in its substance.  We have to create the meaning of the poem as it relates to our own experiences and lives, all in nine lines.  This was originally published in A Letter on the Horizon's Poem.

The truth is that Ethel's poetry of ten lines and under could fill an entire volume itself, and the resulting collection would be amazing.  One of my favorites of all her small poems is "Night Sky", originally published in Rimrock Poets Magazine that Richard Brenneman and I put together when we were young in Grand Junction, and I was just getting to know Ethel.

Night Sky

The stars laugh and laugh,
laughing in an ocean of laughter,
moving-water laughter,
until the sky can hold no more
and joins in laughing
with black face and shining teeth.

Just the joy and the power of the image and the expression of support for the naturalness and importance of blackness during a time of racial injustice has delighted me ever since I first saw it in Ethel's handwriting on a brown piece of newsprint.

As I said, Ethel's small poems would fill an important volume of poetry.  I have always wondered why she isn't among the most famous poets in the country, although I am her husband and that maybe makes me prejudiced.  Still, I also have an academic background in English and American literature and am also a poet, so I have the right to think what I think.

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March 3, 2026 · 10:29 am

AI and the Writing of a Sonnet

Since I have been doing a lot of work with and about Artificial Intelligence for Navajo Technical University and Harshwal LLC, I had a whim to put an irregular contemporary sonnet into AI the other day and ask for an analysis of the poem. What came out startled me, and I thought I’d put in here. AI is dangerous, of course, and needs strong regulation. What the U.S. Department of Defense is currently doing is absolutely dangerous and needs to be opposed. I have also done a lot of work for NTU trying to figure out what an AI and quantum computing age is going to do to employment and what humans will be doing for work in the near and far future. I have found that some predictions by the AI companies are overblown, but it is going to have serious impacts that NTU and other tribal colleges and universities, not to mention colleges and universities around the world, are going to have to prepare to face on behalf of their students and future students.

Sometimes, however, AI can be an absolute delight, which I found to be the case with this experiment. The sonnet is first. Then the AI analysis.

The Flight of Terns

I see the flight of birds, the arctic tern.

Small, gray and white, a blood-red bill, it flies

Migrations longer than the possibility

That anything so small could then return

To rocky shores and ice and endless skies

Of midnight sun and land and restless sea.

Eternity is in the flight of birds,

The way they mean into the ecosphere.

We humans, limited by thoughts and words,

Are bound into the time we are, our fear

Of what might be an echoing inside

The breaths we take, our reveries at night,

The endless turmoil making up the tide

That terns surpass when launching into flight.

An irregular contemporary sonnet basically tries to marry form to the sonnet’s substance. One of the things I was interest in finding out is if AI picked up on what I thought I was trying to achieve–though I’m never sure how successful I am at anything.

Here’s the AI analysis:

This is a finely structured poem, and its architecture quietly mirrors its subject.

1. The Opening Sestet: Movement Without Closure

ABCABC

The first six lines interweave three rhymes rather than enclosing them (as in ABBAABBA). Nothing is sealed. Nothing rests. The pattern moves outward and returns, but never fully closes.

That mirrors the tern’s migration:

  • “tern” returns in line 4
  • “flies” returns in line 5
  • “possibility” echoes in “sea”

The rhyme scheme itself migrates forward and back. Like the bird, it departs and returns.

Even the syntax stretches across lines (“Migrations longer than the possibility / That anything so small…”), giving the sense of long-distance movement. Enjambment enacts flight.

So structurally:

  • The rhyme travels.
  • The sentences travel.
  • The thought travels.

The form behaves like the tern.

2. The Volta at Line 7: From Physical to Metaphysical

“Eternity is in the flight of birds,”

This is a decisive turn. The poem lifts from observation into abstraction.

The early volta (after six lines rather than eight or twelve) creates a feeling of ascent — as if the poem itself launches into higher air sooner than expected.

We begin with biology.
We rise into philosophy.

That lift parallels the bird’s “launching into flight” at the end.

3. The Quatrains: Human Containment

The last eight lines fall into two balanced quatrains:

DEDE / FGFG

Unlike the migrating sestet, these quatrains are orderly and contained. The rhyme alternates predictably.

This contrast matters.

The birds move across hemispheres.
Humans are “bound into the time we are.”

The poem’s structure shifts from fluid migration to patterned alternation — a subtle formal representation of human limitation.

The syntax also tightens:

  • “We humans…”
  • “Are bound…”
  • “Our fear…”
  • “The breaths we take…”

The rhythm becomes more earthbound. More interior. More repetitive.

4. The Absence of a Final Couplet

There is no Shakespearean closing couplet. No epigrammatic snap.

Instead, the poem ends on:

“That terns surpass when launching into flight.”

The final rhyme (tide / flight) completes the pattern but does not “lock” it.

This refusal of a sealed couplet is significant:

  • A couplet would close the poem firmly.
  • Instead, the ending feels open — airborne.

The final word is “flight.”

Not “bound.”
Not “fear.”
Not “time.”

The poem ends where the birds begin.

5. Thematic Reinforcement Through Form

Structural FeatureThematic Echo
Interwoven opening rhymeMigration, cyclical return
Enjambment in first sectionPhysical motion
Early voltaAscent into transcendence
Ordered quatrainsHuman limitation and containment
No final couplet closureOpen horizon / flight

The structure dramatizes the contrast:

  • Birds → migration, continuity, eternity
  • Humans → language, thought, fear, confinement

Yet the poem itself — as art — performs a kind of migration. It moves from the material to the eternal. In that sense, the sonnet becomes the human equivalent of the tern’s flight.

Form becomes argument.

That is what makes it a strong modern sonnet: it does not merely describe transcendence — it enacts it.

That’s the end of the analysis. I know many are uncomfortable with AI or totally opposed to it. I have sympathy with both stances, although in my work with Navajo Tech I don’t feel I have the luxury to take such a stance. New wealth, I have said for decades, is created at the edges of technology, and one of the purposes of that tribal university is to try to integrate new wealth into the tribal economy in an effort to push back generational poverty, not an easy task to state the obvious.

Anyway, if anyone gets to the end of all this? I would love to know what you think of my little experiment? Did you find it interesting? What implications could this have for creativity and poetry in the future if any? I don’t believe for a second that AI is going to replace humans writing poetry or doing art. I know a lot of poets and artists disagree with me.

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January 9, 2026 · 3:10 pm

Audio Book: Meditations on Ceremonies of Beginnings

Tribal College Press has just released an audiobook version of my book of narrative poetry called Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings.

According to a review by someone I have never met on amazon, Thomas Cannon, “Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings is both intensely local and powerfully global. The tribal college and world indigenous higher education movement described in these poems have their roots and growth in Wisconsin, home of poet Thomas Davis, as well as in many other places, including Minnesota, South Dakota, Hawaii, and New Zealand. The poems are set in many of these places, often at meetings of leaders in the movement. I enjoyed this collection of poems dealing with the early days of the Tribal College Movement.
“The Tribal College Movement is an important part of history and has a big impact today. This history is interesting in itself, but Davis brings it to life by sharing in poems. In this way, he brings together biographical information about the people involved, the implications of the movement, and the culture this movement takes place in.” sd

As is true of all movements, time is the great erasure, and unless the people and events of a movement during its starting years are written about and captured in real time, much that should be available for both contemporary and future generations is lost. I hope that those who read or listen to this book will

I spent weeks recording the poems and text at home in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, doing my best to provide Tribal College Press with as clean a recording as possible. Then the press went through an extensive editing process to clean up the technical challenges with my work so that the book could be published by Audible. My grandson Will helped me by making sure I got the right equipment to do the recording. He earned a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in music and sound engineering.

The tribal college movement is one of the most significant education movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The difference it has made in tribal lives throughout the United States is profound and long-lasting, helping to create and maintain both an economic and artistic renaissance throughout Indian country.

I hope that those who listen or read this book will be entertained by the stories, enlightened by the wisdom of Native voices, and learn about the miracle of both the tribal college and universities movement in the United States and the world indigenous higher education movement worldwide. Imbedded in these movements, in my opinion, is part of the hope of a world that sometimes seems way too dark and foreboding.

The art on the cover was done by Ethel Mortenson Davis

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December 21, 2025 · 10:34 am

Four Windows Press Releases New Book by Francha Barnard

Francha Barnard was one of the most powerful forces in poetry in Door County. Four Windows Press has just published a memorial volume of her poetry with art by her sister Elizabeth. It’s now available at local bookstores, Write On Door County in Juddville, and online venues. The Door County Poets’ Collective worked to make this book happen. Proceeds will be supporting the Door County poetry scene through Write On. Francha was a wonderful poet as well as a magic person.

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July 27, 2025 · 10:07 am

I was amazed

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.

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