Two Poems

 

The Doctor Asks My Friend to Follow the Light at the End of Her Pen


Just past daylight the first morning of deer season, the fingers on his left hand go numb. The second time he passes out we’re still half a mile from the truck. He’s a large man and takes up most of the backseat where I’ve covered him in old newspapers and blankets. At the hospital, he opens his eyes to what he describes as a fence of bones: head at rest in the deer’s chest. At 84 his grandmother’s stroke pinned her to the bed. She said ginseng grew in clusters around her feet and she needed to dig the root to heal. Of all of us on the mountain, he’s the best tracker. I’ve seen him get on all fours and follow a trail into a thicket of multiflora rose. As his eyes track the pen, a heron glides above a thin line of shinning water. He smells spoiled eggs and thinks of the swamp where he saw the largest snapping turtle of his life bury itself beneath a log. The gray bird slowly beats its wings toward the horizon while the monitor hooked to his arm buzzes like a woodcock. The doctor’s pen moves back and forth. My friend’s eyes stay snagged on a branch.




The Book that Opens with Night

 


You translated 

the hooved path 

into and out of 

memory. 

How to read 

the snow, the river’s 

current, the wind 

in the chestnut oaks 

that refuses

to turn away.

What is this nest 

I’ve made 

of your death, 

a rank and wild 

scent carried 

to the ground?

 

You neglected

to teach me 

a new language

for your absence. 

Yesterday

a vireo sang 

a noun 

that reminded me 

of how 

last year’s 

beech leaves 

hang on

into the first 

warm days

of spring.

But what does 

the wood frog’s 

verb mean

as its voice 

careens 

the raspberry

dusk?

When five

planets align

we understand

the raven’s

emphatic

protest.

More than three

hundred languages

have been lost

among willow

and alder 

branches.

I’ll ask again

for a way

to change

words 

into a fox

sly enough

to disappear

into the pages

of the book

that opens

with night.

Todd Davis

Todd Davis is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Coffin Honey and Native Species, both published by Michigan State University Press. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

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Jessica Q. Stark’s Buffalo Girl