by
Davis Taylor
The Author
Davis Taylor was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1942. He studied English literature at Williams College, Oxford University, and Yale University, receiving a PhD from Yale in 1969. He taught English at Carleton College until 1982, then changed careers to become a licensed psychologist, and now is a Rosen Method Bodywork practitioner. Since his years at Oxford, he has been writing poetry. He has also recently completed a memoir, Heart’s Way: A Story of Healing. He has two adult sons and lives with his wife Becky McDowell in Ashland, Wisconsin.
To Becky
Your kindness holds me
more sweetly than all the love
I have ever known.
Acknowledgments
The poems We Too Have Bicycles, My Hands, The Paratrooper, The Visit (with the title Love Poem), Model, and Occupied were originally published in The Carleton Miscellany. Paul’s Poem to Save the Whales and No Trespassing first appeared in The Carleton Magazine and Afterwards in The Minnesota Review.
I’d like to thank Keith Harrison, my friend and mentor in the 1970's, for help with many of my earlier poems and Joe Winter, lost and rediscovered friend, for help more recently. Both are extraordinarily fine poets, and my own awkward moments are not their doing.
Finally, my thanks to Writer’s Workshop, Kolkata, India, and to P. Lal, whose sustained, generous commitment to publishing has kept poetry, “the key of remembrance,” alive.
After Dinner on Willard Street
Paul’s Poem to Save The Whales
The hard ground furrowed in ups and downs
is just about ready to spill me head over heels
into the dirt unless I run fast, faster,
head so far in front the legs can’t catch up
until I swing around a tree and drop beneath.
Afternoon sunlight laps under apple branches.
Big ones stay mottled brown, but high twigs,
finger thick, are split black and white
until the sun’s falling thins away the line
and ice is left wrinkling across the sky.
All this I had to tell you.
(1965)
I dream of a lace dress
kicked to the bottom of the bed
leaving dimpled arms, a body
twig-like, smooth and firm.
I wake finding you
complete and unexpected.
(1965)
I’ve hurt you
and your hurt surprises me
like a branch that curls,
darts across the whitened wall
pushed by a car’s bright lights.
I sit by the window.
The room swings in the dark,
moored to quiet pain.
(1968)
I go out to see what’s banging.
I check the water pump, the door of the barn.
Mist everywhere, the hay crib,
a dinghy floating.
Back in bed I know your breathing,
the fridge’s chug, a pine scraping the window,
but what’s between puzzles me
like something I must remember.
(1978)
When I was a child
I called into the woods,
“Hello, hello, it’s me.”
I wove my shadow through the apple trees
and was lonely.
The moon is full tonight,
the oak stenciled against the advancing clouds.
I must go further out beyond your mind
until I am alone again,
my mind racing.
(1978)
Walking into town, I count all the ways you anger me
how, eyes to the side, you fret your lips
how you dance, making me look like a skinny kid waiting at the bus stop
your pride
your kindness to no matter what idiot visits
your memory of every destructive thing I say to tell me, oh, so sweetly later
leave a room, you leave on the lights
you can’t hear me, the water’s running
OK, swing the axe the way you want
it’s bad enough now, you getting all the blankets by two a. m.
Home, sitting at a desk, you itch under layers of wool
yes, I know, I keep the house freezing, but what did you expect
six years old, I was counting the pennies in my piggy bank
I told you, didn’t I?
(1978)
We push through yellow broom.
The salt marsh seethes.
Thousands of horseshoe crabs copulate in the ditches.
I touch one, feel threads of intimacy.
You seize my hand.
Forward and back, the shiny carapaces move
in dulled, or not so dulled, ecstasy.
Who can tell beneath their shells?
I shiver from cold.
(1978)
You ask, why don’t I
sing or
whistle around
the house?
Our neighbor, the minister
whistles
beautifully the B flat
Partita perched on his gliding
Schwinn.
Big chunks of stone,
grass and beetles,
I like their edges, their
exactitude,
but I am puzzled by
all these
passing fluctuations
made of air.
Uncertain
I listen to my breathing.
(1971)
For Ana (1943-2000)
On the porch rail,
an orange feathered bird
aflame in the sun.
A man in white approaches.
He says that I have always loved him
and asks that I follow.
Is he you?
You are gone now
and I am here.
(2005)
My hands
cold, delicate, dry as silver.
On the trunks of black trees, you can find
burls of twisted branches, my knuckles and veins.
In air they are stiff,
in hot water nimble as seaweed.
I run my hands along piano strings and make music.
I suck on them, such kisses.
I am not vain. My hands are hairy
and wander like worn slippers,
at night, fat cabbages
pressed to my thighs.
I keep my hands in my pockets. They’re old
and I very young.
(1971)
In Memory of Bruce Warner
the plane shudders
you suck at your tongue
–it will not come
it will not come
no no now
no no now
it will not come
no but no but
tired
spat out
no side no
edge
hole
hole
hole
hole
you
are falling
high slow happy
mother
is blowing out the light
I want to say that you are still up there,
a hawk, eye swivelling.
I want you to draw together, fall,
throw wings over a squealing rabbit,
hug and leave clean bones.
Down at the back pond where
we skated long afternoons,
I poke among the ferns. If you are there,
the cold is over you too deeply.
The wind pulls at my scarf.
The metal ice, hard to the edge, roars under
my blades.
(1972)
sparrow toes curl in the loosening wind
no branch is with a crushed wing high enough
clouds windows terrify
across your tongue the dry sweet taste of pollen
sparrow in the night falling
stars terrify in the loosening wind
no branch high enough or high
in the trees in the darkening trees are bells
(1978)
the night is long in this old house
music, whisky, the friends
of friends talking of friends
my mind wanders
one hand reaches into the ice
the other writes on the steamy window
this, this, this
off-center the house creaks
round and around the table
seech, seech, seech
gulls at the window
a drunk geneticist affirms
only in Anglo-Saxon lands
pregnant women suck wooden spoons
so, so, so
he rocks in his rocking chair
to the top of the tumbling stairs
sleep, sleep, sleep
(1972)
He posed me like Donatello’s David,
hips curved, eyes down,
naked. How could I know he’d like
my lanky bod, or I his heavy face?
I would be perfect, young and motionless.
Wind shook the framed house,
his brush rasped at the canvas,
I felt no need.
It was enough, I told myself,
to be there,
seen. Watching his hands,
I wondered if he’d touch me.
“It’s you?” he asks.
“No, it’s not me,” I laugh
collecting my body
as I step down once more from his painting.
(1973)
Your hens eat themselves
your wife paces an asylum
the top of your head a ruin
I’m sick of you,
your constant walking, stained gums.
Your eldest daughter sits outside your house,
taunts with chaste eyes,
until, as in the winter vines,
she’ll stoop and gather you.
Each plane tree a polished jar,
you and the swallows dart between.
Mongol farmers over the hill
plant cabbages upside down.
You take my hand, smile their smile.
Your roots are in the air.
(1974)
Five days I wait, like a cuckoo clock
sticking my head out the window
to watch each beggar stoop by
until finally M. Fourmond, master plombier, knocks.
We descend to the basement, lift
fungi that nibble like a horse’s lips.
“Watch for the dry corners,” he cries,
and I remember a dream when I tried to boil
scorpions, lobster big, for a snack.
The pickaxe knocks through the wall of the cistern.
Bile seeps onto the dirt floor.
We double over, potato diggers, scratching.
Hours pass.
His face blocks the window.
I imagine
it’s finished. I am walking into the olive grove
saying, don’t glance up, don’t see him
bent double with the picnic basket climbing closer
over the vines, the leaves, the window,
it’s finished, he and I
arm and arm swing through olive trees,
we sit at dinner, crack scorpions open,
he rises into the branches,
it’s finished, he’s not watching me
bent double, fingers pushing at the brains.
He’s left. I’m saying he’s left,
saying there’s beauty in finite ends
though I’m smoothing the creamy plaster
which lifts with my hand.
I look through the window into the olive grove.
Each tree in the moonlight is a black mill wheel,
the leaves turning round.
I watch until the trees are olive trees.
(1977)
who beat and raped you
in the alley by the small town’s shoe store
and classy dress shop, how you got back,
were found curled on the floor,
you did not remember
and would startle us, my wife and me in bed
an hour, knocking at the door, and weeks after
I lay awake waiting. You would not trouble me,
you’d say, and ate dry cereal, drank coffee.
I asked if you were still dizzy when you walked,
or couldn’t you eat more.
Apple, lilac, lily of the valley
and the dark bruises beneath your eye
blossomed. He crushed your face
like a car whacking a bird.
If I had touched you, you wouldn’t have come back.
It’s five years, and you write to me
from a cabin in the mountains little of yourself–
how a friend has left to marry,
how it’s enough to wash one’s face in the snow,
to walk under the dark fir.
(1979)
For you, the pale blue stones, like opals, white veined, thumb long, smooth,
are whales swooping through the pebbles in front of our house.
Any other scrap of stone or brick’s a helicopter, truck, or boat as your story changes.
The opals don’t change. They’re whales.
At the Nantucket museum, you touch a whale boat, lift an oar in your hands.
You do not understand the picture of a man hugging a whale’s bleeding back.
Your world is rimmed by sea; the sun, the red eye of a whale.
You ask, “What does horses say?” and when I whinny, ask, “A man inside?”
Last week at the zoo, you heard a beluga whale.
Before you sleep, the whale inside you, you sing her song.
(1982)
The yellow-stained curtains, looped with braided silk,
hang regularly in the windows, and the grass grows
with a weird evenness as if only the shadows of the beech trees
shimmer across it, and the blackbird’s shadow
strutting the wire to the house’s corner
where it stops against clapboards
dry as bone. Its wings leave no mark.
The house is spring-willow-green.
The cedar shakes knit together at night.
You imagine a table set
with a bowl of ripe pears,
wash shivering on the line,
a boy at the pump, water splashing over his hands.
He approaches.
Are you are one of his family?
You cross the porch to the dust-frosted window,
the yard still, only the squeak of boards beneath.
The half called I is not here.
(1984)
I used to think your poems had little to say,
but deep meanings matter less now
and of irony, God who has all has none.
Out of aery nothing–local events,
birthdays, a leaving–come your poems
in lines the sun burns through.
(1986)
Closeness is hard. I prefer
biases and sad complaints
to being in the green of Your eye
unroofed to aching stillness
and floods that rush through
leaving me ripped land of old winter.
Giving birth is hard for a man.
I have never known in my body
such letting go, and I can scarcely
believe grace bears on me.
You hurt like love hurts breath,
and let nothing between us,
no turning from terror
before Your obliterating light.
(1992)
For Jean Who Helped There
The not known, not spoken, sucks us in.
So the blast sucks, then spits you
twirling like seeds into the sea.
Quieter than a flame, this darkness.
In the most intimate places of ecstasy
fish nudge insistently.
When God came to Mary, she took Him in.
What child she’d bear? A god, yes,
but half bull, or goat with human hair?
We tug the bags up the beach,
open them–the shock of life,
crabs feeding.
In tents, we examine DNA,
take dental records, and, most strange,
because sea-cured flesh is jelly soft,
to fingerprint, like turning a glove inside out,
we peel the skin back,
then slip our fingers in.
Christ, in entering us
you burned up
all images of what a god should be.
Now, as we slip death on, everything,
suburbs, cars, offices, children, lovers,
burns away leaving us ashen.
(1993)
When I see Christ die,
I see light stream
through a broken vial
soaking wood, tree, galaxy.
When I see Christ arise,
I see a man
approach, an ordinary man,
whose gaze holds mine.
When I get up from fever,
I feel my every cell washed
as by a summer shower,
Christ flowing through me.
(1996)
This morning,
almost snow
drops quietly from heaven,
then, gathering into syllables,
taps the rusted gutter.
Facing the year’s darkening,
I wonder, is this enough–
a sufficiency in pain,
the heart easing into gentleness?
When I listen
neither word nor silence,
the uneven rain.
(2004)
Two leaves spiral up past the window–
like birds quarreling,
gone in a second.
An oak leaf
sweeps by, a pause,
and then another.
Afterwards nothing
but the wind’s ever changing
pitch of howl.
Our lives appear
and will be gone.
Nothing’s lost.
(2004)
Springwater Retreat, February 2005, led by Toni Packer
Eyes watchful, six deer
tiptoe through the snow into
the sparkling garden.
A dog yaps. How long
have I been lost in thinking?
Yapping’s quieter.
Balanced, gaze lowered,
a man smiles opposite me,
never seen before.
Snow so delicate
felt, not seen until settling
on my coat’s dark sleeve.
Chickadees at suet,
afternoon thoughts peck at me.
Shoo away, sweet ones.
What’s that, a stomach
or the coyotes’ howling
over the next hill?
Six haiku today.
Sometimes I go months and find
not a single poem.
This morning, I glance
up looking for deer. Before
I see them, they’re here.
Coy silence, am I
scaring you away again
with my loving words?
The bell rings. Circling
feet like summer rain stop and
I hurtle through space.
So dark now the deer
crossing the new snow have lost
their names. Are they here?
I sleep peacefully,
then wake with worry making
a big deal of me.
Criss-crossed branches form
a haphazard, laddered net
for the sun to climb.
OK beings change
easily. Not OK, it’s hard.
Now, then, how are you?
Everything’s taken
care of in the unborn mind
where awareness is.
Poems made up of here
and not here. A barn-shaped cloud
rises on the hill.
Sparrows fly into
dark cedars, thoughts into air.
All that’s left is song.
Clouds rise into clouds.
Look, over the mud-filmed road
the light goes riding.
A man sobs in the
darkened hall. I lean toward him
leaving space between.
Ahead, two people
stand close on the moonlit path.
Turning, it’s a deer.
This dawn, a full moon
veiled in fog. The woods are pale
like faded blossoms.
Waiting for the tree
to empty, now, now, of crows
and my mind of thoughts.
The man who smiles is
still here. Is he inside or
outside of me?
Like a pilgrim’s hut
my heart is open. Won’t you
come in to love’s fire?
Again, dawn and sun.
From the mist-hidden garden,
crows, chickadees fly.
Evening, a pale sky,
a quiet mind. Look ahead.
No words beyond these.
(2005)
“The dead and living surface, then slip away
through twisting branches, sofas, chairs, in mute
parade down flooded streets...” so I wrote
and could not hear I was off-key, remote
from what had really happened when the levees
broke, until, at our writer’s group last night,
I heard others read of New Orleans.
Then, beside their images, mine seemed trite.
It wasn’t that first day of hurricane,
though terrifying, trees tossed like shingles, rain
pressing, jostling, breaking apart the door
but two days after, baking hot, when the fetid,
noisome waters rose. A family climbs
up stairs to the second floor, safe, then not.
They’re found Friday trapped in the attic, standing
on chairs, a clarinet on mantel drowned.
Apartment dwellers clamber out a window
to the roof, hold signs, “Help, no water.”
Sheriffs form lines across a bridge, declare
no Black can cross. Marked with orange chalk,
a body smells, and at the city jail,
waters rising, the guards walk off. “It was bad,”
an inmate says of those left locked in cells,
“Ain’t no telling now what happened there.”
In every poem, I heard our anger, shame,
“Drive north,” lame without a car,
and something fiercer far, like we too
got hit hard in the gut, gasped for air,
and yet we spoke our poems, held off despair,
that pain not isolate though stun our hearts.
Leaving, I saw beyond the Court House lawn
Lake Superior extend as if at prayer.
I walked back home and wrote this poem again
stronger, carrying now a gathered voice
of varying music, appreciation, for you,
New Orleans, as port of choice for Midwest
grain, home for Creole, gumbo, jazz,
and for your generations who have remained,
by blood, not reason swayed. They held as true,
the bud flowers only on its branch.
All’s wrecked, gardens, homes, the corner store,
weeks under seeping water, poisoned deep.
We’ve records of your jazz, but it takes more,
years of listening until the speech is yours.
Now plywood boards up all, mansions, shacks.
After this loss, however you rebuild,
let us not once turn our backs again,
visit Fat Tuesday, leave you the cross.
If once remote from me, you are no more.
I listen to the radio: what storm
will blow through next, where bestride the land?
Your shore is gone. Only skeletons of buildings
stand, sucked by flow of muddy tide.
Where will you go? My guest room’s free. Come in.
We’ll find something to say by the kitchen door.
It’s strange, you so near, like in heaven.
(2005)
In front of the brown, asbestos-sided houses of Ashland
apple, lilac, and plum stand blossoming
as I descend carefully the cracked sidewalk
down to the Vaughn Library to pick up two books
on inter-library loan, the work of my old friend Jack;
then crossing the train station’s abandoned parking lot,
I read randomly remembering thirty years ago
how we talked of Walter Benjamin, I trying to understand,
Jack far ahead, inducing, deducing from his brilliant mind.
At County Market, my second stop, I find Go Lean Cereal
and Jacob’s Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, carrying the label
“winery of the year.” At check out, the cashier asks, “Debit or credit?”
and when my mind blanks, “Well, do you sign?” she says.
I say yes, she says credit. She’s patient,
but a voice inside says, “Duh, you shudda known.”
Deduced, induced, debit, credit. My friend writes of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment: “The implied clockwise, solar (east-west) turning
of the Pillar thus counters the implied counter-clockwise, anti-solar
turning of the Cross.” That’s Jack, I think while crossing Sixth Street,
but I persevere to find revealed his passion for truth
found not in univocal authority but in a community’s ever turning
thoughtful “exchange of challenge and acknowledgment.”
I feel joy walking with Jack–that he cares
and wants the world to wake from wasteful loss–and then a sadness.
His book, fifteen years old, feels stiff in my hands.
Who, if anyone, has opened it before?
Years back, I left Jack’s life of art and criticism
to study healing. I thought my way was different.
Now, I wonder, what’s nature, art?
Debit, credit? Who’s to say?
“Winery of the year,” does a label make it so?
Go Lean....
No, best like Jack, go rich into art’s richest realms,
Picasso, Proust, Shakespeare, Michelangelo.
I would, if I had a mind like his, and trust
that art, opened, creates...
creates what?
I see, now, it’s up to me.
Hello, World!
If I lament, a mind like his,
resign myself to difference and stupidity,
the book stays closed, but if I dare face thoughts’
and the sun’s ever turning, then, with Jack,
amidst the apple, lilac, plum,
I share the joy of words opening to air.
(2005)
Multiply. God’s will,
Wall Street’s too.
Need cash, borrow.
Dissatisfied, you can do better.
Life passes fast.
There’s wisdom for you,
and from high places.
What have we got?
SUVs, ATVs, plasma screen TVs.
Happiness? I suppose, at least a moment’s
pleasure, not to mention, well,
go outside. Taste.
Is that sulphur on your tongue?
What blears your eyes?
The temperature’s up or, like Bush,
you’re cool in denial. Look,
the pot’s cracked, humanity amuck.
If you won’t notice, I don’t know what to say.
I’ve been told, don’t preach.
You can’t change anyone, so go along.
A humvee’s nice, or winning the lottery.
It was different once, long afternoons, rain.
People read books, played music.
There wasn’t much to do,
time so slow it didn’t seem to pass.
Life gathered, if we trust art.
There’s Natasha trembling at the ball,
Lear, Cordelia dead in his arms,
Dante transfixed by the weave of Light.
There was nothing to add, no haste, no waiting.
For them, all was collapsed to now,
and through them life sparked
love, Saraswati, the heart’s deep song.
I’ve been taught, try harder,
work at it–no, the song’s not thus gained.
Better the heart stutter its pain.
What is is, not out there.
The lotus flowers,
the stone burns within.
(2005)
“Preppy white bottom guy,
PNP friendly,
wants to get fucked.”
“Where’s my fuckin’ burger?
Ten minutes for a fuckin’ burger.
Hey! What’s wrong with this sty.”
“Asshole. You just about killed me,
cut me off. Are you blind,
talking on your freakin’ phone?”
“It’s arrogant
to think you can make it on your own.
You need church, AA. I did.”
“April’s my hardest month, no kidding.
Days go by before I’m up.
Prozac helps. You ought to try it.”
“Sustainable? Who needs commies up here?
Let ‘em pack off to Sweden with their damned wolves,
leave us the deer.”
“Why listen? I tune out Baba freaks
so I don’t get pissed off. They don’t want to hear
about Christ or truth.”
“Did you hear that guy shrieking in the corner?
Sounds like Rush Limbaugh.
How come he’s allowed at the Cat?”
As I listen, I think they’re not me.
What’s PNP? I don’t take Prozac,
go to church
or spend all day hangin’ at the Cat,
but then I remember. I’ve been to AA,
done drugs, politics, religion,
got pissed yesterday at an asshole on the road.
You too?
When I listen, I weep.
(2005)
I’ve followed who I’ve been around the corners of becoming,
done right, after a fashion, act after act,
and gained the satisfaction of importance by helping others,
a patterned life reflected in my morning’s mirrored face,
familiar mien of education, expectation of respect.
All fit well. The hours passed with writing, lunch, a nap, clients, dinner,
evening meetings, then weekends more relaxed, a soccer game.
Those days I worked, I felt the grace of life flow through my hands
to meet another’s pain, whose gratitude meant much to who I was.
I’ve dropped all this. I remember why: I had a plan to become
holy from much quiet, sitting, watching my thoughts,
getting to know myself, a road less taken but taken all the same
but not to where I thought. The road, it seems, ends in emptiness,
not Buddha-like, just utter loss of all I was,
a life I thought had meaning for me and others too.
Still, when the time comes to sit each morning, I am there,
no longer waiting for anyone to join me, call me holy or seek advice,
but just to sit and watch passing how much I like to be liked,
how hard it is for me to be still, unimportant, doing nothing.
If someone asked me why I keep this up, I’d wonder what to say
except each day I am brought to a place I cannot name but the same place
that calls me to love. When I think, does this matter or am I changing,
I feel dissatisfied, but when I stop, I’m quiet. That’s all the answer that I have.
(2005)
A crow caws, and then another.
A clock ticks.
July.
Peace holds me.
“Whoever knocks, let in,” says peace.
There, the coo of a mourning dove,
there, the answer.
Glory explodes in every cell through vast, infinitesimal distances, you and me.
Over the house the locust lays a leafy canopy.
At dawn, I thought I heard the music of the spheres. Not so, tires humming
along Route Two.
They’ll stop someday, the galaxies expand till dark.
What will be left?
I shoo a wasp from dinner’s wine, the bricks gritty under my feet.
I like being I, no one really.
(2005)
When time stops for you on a summer’s eve,
hushed in the midst of hills,
and when sleeping before dawn
you are aware only of being,
at these times you know of timelessness.
I know for then we are one,
but interspersed are other times
when you and I are separate, a blessing too
that at the end you might be there,
the something of your touch
to rest upon the hinge of nothingness
as even now I leave these words for you.
(2005)
Southeast, a gentle spattering breeze
and then, sheer from the west, winds
tear at plastic bags, batter the house.
Lights blink, then off.
I fear the locust tree will crack.
Afternoon, the storm is gone
but I am tense
watching until night comes clear.
After such a raucous storm,
are we not nameless all?
(2005)
A
rounder
maple tree
you’ll never see
than this, scarlet limbs
an autumn day spreading
over the yellowing hay
a labyrinth of light and grey,
dusty paths weaving under the wind
in gentle sway as phoebes tune
joyfully their matinee.
Ordinary beauty,
the vibrant glory
of everyday,
awaits if
we just
be.
(2005)
Wind rattles the cabin. From the porch,
I watch the birch leaves fall. Some,
like sparrows, flutter, lift, swirl,
then streak across the lake. Others, propeller-like, spin
down invisible cylinders immune from every gust.
Occasionally, a leaf plummets straight down, rippling the water.
At the same instant, two from a single branch jump,
one in somersault’s disarray tumbles through the air,
the other, duck-like, in steady glide skims to the dock.
A few quivering on trees will fall tonight with cold.
(2005)
At low tide, off the forward deck
a sailor drops the weighted chain, cries out the depth.
The ship is steady, unfamiliar now,
the point rounded, the breakwater slipping back.
On the dock, people emerge as if sketched in charcoal.
Gulls squeal, officers talk in hushed voices, the engine thrums.
The cliff rises, looms over the white-washed town.
A customs shed blocks the pier’s end, windowless, rusted.
Passengers glance furtively, checking passports, suitcases.
The expanse of sea fades to quickening speech, dialects, languages.
Faces now recognizable. Coming home. Leaving.
(2005)