Map-dot of scorn and insufferable summers, your corrals and dead ends drove me coastal. I sought some unhemmed fringe where ragged waves shush like a comforting bedtime mother. Locked in by toll roads and bloodlines, your people detest the salt and light of a shifting beach. Your trembling livestock turn circles, confined by barbed wire and their thinning shadows. Brown as a horseshoe crab, the sod under hooves feeds the frenzied stampede to nowhere. Single-story buildings wall in Main Street with green brass names, diminishing bricks. Daily I press fading footprints in sand populated by overnight shells polished and pushed ashore.
It has broad, old trees with bear-paw leaves offered by hands of wind onto a blue pond, and the poet has told you these leaves are ships of a season, smaller Argos floating toward winter. Winter will mean death as it does in a poem, and you’ll ponder mortality – your life as leaf-boat crossing this finite and funny-shaped body, driven by holy breath wholly beyond your rudder stem. Your sadness will be rich and brief like boyhood butterscotch in church, and your eyes will leave the page as you sigh, content with humanity still sweet on your tongue. Later you’ll attempt your own poem and some of those same words will slip into your stanzas, unmoored from branches in the brain, placed upon a rippled plain to begin another voyage.
Begin the collection with a backyard blue jay’s fallen plume, or the beige quill from a mockingbird. From there, take to the woods, and seek striped specimens lost by hawks, or brown and black chevrons shed by turkeys. Avoid the frill and fluff of fakes: craft store ostrich or peacock phonies molded and glued on a factory line. Wade the creek instead, and locate a left-behind owl feather dropped in nocturnal hunting where water runs life. Let the discovered speak wisdom: textures and colors united but scattered like so much ambition melted from Icarus.
For one who will not return here You reject the universal rural truths like rusted nails in a cloudy canning jar: Relics bent by someone else’s force. Behind an expatriate grin, you hide our dialect like warped boards we conceal back of the barn: Too good to burn, too turned for building. The homesick tears behind your eyes thicken like wood glue, stick in your sockets: Hardened to hold your gaze toward the future. You muscle memories into rebellious reasons like a crooked drawer that still closes flush: Stubborn friction preserves continuing conflict.
John Davis, Jr. is the author of four books of poetry including Hard Inheritance (Five Oaks Press, 2016) and Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014). His poems have been published in literary journals internationally, with notable appearances in Nashville Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Common, Tampa Review, and many more. He teaches college English courses in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.
Three illustrations from Lectures on Ventilation—Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia during the winter of 1866-6, by Lewis W. Leeds, Special Agent of the Quartermaster General for the Ventilation of Government Hospitals during the War and Consulting Engineer of Ventilation and Heating for the US Treasury Department. “Man’s own breath is his greatest enemy.” JOHN WILEY & SON, PUBLISHERS, 1869.
(Suggested by the Public Domain Review.)
