Read an Excerpt
Winterkill
Poems
By Todd Davis Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2016 Todd Davis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-257-5
CHAPTER 1
Homily
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul,
O I say now these are the Soul!
— WALT WHITMAN
By the second week in September nuthatches capture the last
elderberries, excrement purpled and extravagant, sprayed
drunkenly across my truck's hood. I've been thinking about the God
I pray to with no lasting effect and note the effortless work
the stream does as it feeds these bushes. My father was baptized
in the Green River, led by the hand in white robes to be dunked
beneath the current. Sometimes when mother gathers sheets
from the clothesline in late summer, she finds the droppings
of a bluebird written like a sacred text. But what saint could decipher it?
In a field reclaimed by clover, I sprawl sideways and count
the small green hands of the leaves enfolding me. The gentle sshh,
sshh of the wind dismisses my garbled words as they break
the water's surface or cross over the low hum of bees. Eventually
we have to ascend to breathe, accepting the uncertainty of the air
above our heads. At dusk a skein of geese skitters in a half-formed V,
and a skulk of fox pups gnaw at each other's throats in a game
to prepare for death. Salvation is supposed to be sweet, like the sugar
of a wild grape, but where would we be without the fossil record to lead?
All of us are worth saving, despite the stink we've made since learning
to walk upright 400,000 years ago. As a boy, when a calf got scours,
my father would search the field for lamb's ear, collecting its velvet
leaves to better dress the open sores that ran the length of the flanks.
His mother told him mercy is all Jesus wants of anyone. I believe,
despite my unbelief. When the Belgian drapes its sorrel neck
across the paddock gate, I offer him two handfuls of clover
I painstakingly picked.
Phenology: Actias luna
I've been afraid of your going, which was inevitable,
like the luna moth that wakes, makes love, lays
her eggs on the bottom sides of leaves, then dies.
Everything transpires. This moth that lives only a week,
born without a mouth. The painting you gave me that holds
a tree in the center, branches decorated with hands and feet,
each with lips saying their names. When I speak your name,
I feel the soft brush of insect wings across my cheek.
Afterlife
When the owl came down
through the branches of an oak,
having left its perch in a black cherry
where my son sat in a ladder-stand
waiting for deer to trail the old ravine,
its face was illuminated by the last
of the moon, wings nearly silent,
my dead father's face staring at me,
grinning with rings of feathers
and a plump shrew dangling
from its beak.
Sulphur Hatch
Tonight our son is on the river
that runs through the upper pasture.
The cattle low as he loops
a nearly invisible line
into the air.
Above the water sulphurs hatch
and trout begin to surface.
The sun descends between
a water gap that joins Bell's Run
to our river.
The sky this time of night
whitens to the color of a blackberry
blossom, and a kingfisher flies
out of a sycamore to dive
at the spine of a trout.
Yesterday we found a fish,
gray and stiff, at the clear bottom
of the stream. We tossed it
onto the bank, hoping a raccoon
might scavenge it.
In this half-light, our boy is walking
home across the early June hay.
Each step he takes
leaves a shadowed space
we'll see come morning.
Mud Dauber
Work with a hammer teaches us: blood under the nail
forms a half-moon. A fist at the side of the head teaches us:
blood on the tongue tastes like sun-warmed iron.
Blood itches as it dries the jagged lines
the locust thorn leaves, while chamber by chamber
the nest grows on the underside of an old board.
Yesterday my youngest was stung by a wasp, foot swelling
twice its size. As we sit on the porch after dinner, barn swallows
fly in and out of the loft, bellies the color of sky at dusk.
Only in this new dark does the buzzing finally stop.
In a Dream William Stafford Visits Me
He is walking across a field of wheat
in Kansas, grain as tall as his shoulder
and as tan as his face. He is cupping his hands
to his mouth, shouting words the wind steals
and throws into the air like chaff. I need to know
what he's said and begin chasing his voice as it scuttles
across the ground like a sheaf of newsprint.
He, too, is running, but on a slender path in Oregon
cut by the hooves of ungulates. For someone
who's been dead nearly twenty years, he is remarkably fit,
and I can't catch him until he stops at the bottom of the hill
where a stream washes on toward a bay. He says
the sea knows mistakes he has made. He says
the tides have told the world about them.
He points to the sky, and my eye follows
into the tops of these finely needled trees
where darkness and light marry. He asks
for a glass of water, and I realize he is laid out
on our couch downstairs, head propped on a pillow,
left arm bending like a basket to cradle his thick
mat of hair. The lamp on the end table sheds a circle
of light, and he muses about what is hidden
between the pine cone's creased tongues. I stumble
over the Latin for lodgepole, pinus contorta,
and tell him this tree must have fire
to release its seed. He is writing on a legal pad
in his barely legible scrawl. I make out the words
let and fire and come.
By the Rivers of Babylon
The father of a boy my son plays basketball with
overdosed last week. Out of prison less than two days, he slid
the needle into that place where he wanted to feel something
like God and pushed the plunger of the syringe. The boy isn't any good
at sports, but when the coach subs him late in the game, score
already settled, we cheer wildly, as if he's performed a miracle,
when he makes a layup or snares a rebound. Heroin is sold
in narrow spaces between row houses in the first few blocks
that rise from the railroad tracks and train shops. This part of town
still looks like the 1950s, if the soft pastels of that decade
had crumbled to gravel and ash. The boy lives with his grandmother
in a curtained white house near the cathedral. His mother,
who lost custody when he was five, is back in jail for possession.
At the funeral, my son and his friends pat the boy on the shoulder,
mumble they're sorry after the mass, then usher him to the pizza shop
where they eat as many slices as their stomachs will hold.
In Pennsylvania, if you keep your eyes on the horizon,
the mountains look heavenly. The white lines that snake
through the gaps in winter become streams that hold
the most delicate fish. As the snowpack melts,
there's more water than we know what to do with,
all of it rushing toward the valley and the muddy river
whose banks keep washing away.
Drouth
That's what we called it, locked in the speech
our father spoke, like the farm pond we dug in '74,
war already having buried our brother
in the mud of another country. First a few days
without rain, then a string even longer,
until there was nothing for three months.
The melons in the far field shriveled like corpses,
and the water dropped from twelve feet to half that.
Soon the dark light farther down began to fade.
Fish lost the paths they followed in the weeds,
bodies floating to the top where we skimmed them
to scatter in the fields. We sowed scaled carcasses
where corn was supposed to be, hoping the smell
wouldn't choke us, hoping the wind wouldn't come
from the south. We'd been taught to waste nothing,
taught that fish, when caught and opened to rot,
can call down rain, swim into soil's cracks,
fins becoming stalks, reborn into green blades.
After the Third Concussion
As fewer and fewer leaves remain, the woods brighten
like a minnow's flash in a stream that has shrunk
from July's heat. With more light the moss greens
to the shade of a football field where a groundskeeper
spreads nitrogen and runs the sprinklers all night.
In the left drawer of my desk, wrapped in paper towel,
sit three claws I salvaged from a bear's rotting foot.
He died in January — first thaw,
then days of cold rain. What else can you do
once hunger awakens you? Two nights ago
the moon's white and the river's black plaited themselves
into silver braids, devouring my grandmother's hair.
As the sun rose like a peach, juice dripping
on summer's chin, the spear of fish that skulks
the shallows slept, and the stars above my head
went out, one by one.
What My Neighbor Tells Me Isn't Global Warming
Two hours west in Pittsburgh my friend's snow peas blossom, only
mid-April and his lettuce already good for three weeks. Whenever my
neighbor and I meet at our mailboxes, he tells me, Global warming's a
bunch of bullshit, the same way you or I might say, How's the weather?
or, Sure could use some rain. It's a strange salutation, but he's convinced
the president is a communist. I keep asking my wife if any of this is
going to change. I think she's tired of my questions. Yesterday our
son wrote a letter to give to his girlfriend after he breaks up. He says
he's real sorry. So am I. The tears they'll cry are no different than our
cat's wailing to be let out, despite the rain that's been falling since
dawn. The three donkeys that graze in the pasture share the field
with exactly eleven horses. It's instructive that the horses don't lord it
over the donkeys that they're horses. For two straight weeks in March
it was thirty degrees warmer than it should've been. Last night the
moon shot up brighter than I've ever seen it, a giant eyeball staring us
down, or one of those lightbulbs that's supposed to last for five years.
The weatherman called it perigee on the six o'clock news, so I walked
to the pasture to see if it made any difference to the donkeys. Each
time a horse shuffled its hooves and spread its legs to piss or fart, the
shadow looked like a rocket lifting off. Awe and wonder is what I feel
after a quarter century of marriage. My wife just shakes her head when
I say her right ankle is like a wood lily's stem, as silky and delicate as
that flower's blossom. If she'd let me, I'd slide my hand over her leg
for hours without a trace of boredom. This past week largemouth bass
started spawning in the weeds close to shore, patrolling back and forth
with a singular focus. You can drag a popper or buzzbait right in front
of them and they'll ignore it. All this land we live on was stripped for
timber and coal a century ago. We still find lumps, hard and black,
beneath the skin. Now it's fracking for natural gas. Can you imagine?
We're actually breaking the plates on purpose. I know what my
grandmother would've said about that. Last time, before the mining
and timber companies pulled up stakes, they brought in dozers that
raked what little soil was left, planted thin grasses and pine trees. With
the real forest gone, warm wind funnels through the gaps in the ridges,
turns the giant turbine blades we've bolted to the tops of mountains.
For Jim Daniels
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Winterkill by Todd Davis. Copyright © 2016 Todd Davis. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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