Fall 2013, Volume 15

Poetry by Carol V. Davis

Cyclamen

Behind the glass of windowpane, wavy
so the plants in the garden appear bloated,
a little drunk, stems lean dangerously to the left.
He paces the narrow nursery aisles,
pauses to choose seedlings.
Never doubts their promise of growth,
trusts in the color photo on the card
atop a plastic stem.
So when the shooting stars of cyclamen burst
white instead of fuchsia, it is a betrayal.
In 3rd grade he’d confided
in his friend about a secret crush on a girl
with bangs black as soil.
Everyone in homeroom spotted his initials
planted with hers in the center of a heart,
dug into the splintered wood of his desk.
Next day he pleaded with his mother.
Perhaps his poppy red cheeks a sign of fever;
she wavers,  remembering the time she missed
the scarlet fever, guilt racking her for years.
She lets him stay home, burrowed under the sod of his quilt.
He needs that, a chance for new growth to graft.
A spindly limb to sprout on the trunk of the old orange tree.

The Dog

Watching a three-legged dog hop
down the street, tongue lolling
in syncopation with his white-tipped tail.

He must know of his loss,
but what does he make of it?

In his dreams, he chases rabbits on all fours,
scrambles nimbly up trees after squirrels.

Nothing to stop his scratching that leg.

This block too is hobbling:
One neighbor banished to a nursing home,
her husband reads the sidewalk with a cane,

his vision faded to a gray field.
He flew F86s in the Korean War.
A scrawny kid, he didn’t know he could,

though he peered through the cockpit window.
He doesn’t talk much about it, but when
he stares into space, he zeroes in
on the crosshairs of his target.

Fur Coat

I borrowed a fur coat in Russia.
As the temperature notched below zero,
I lost the shame of wearing it.
Friends complimented me and I smeared
these remarks on my cheeks as rouge.
Soon my skin became the skin of the animal.
I dove in snow banks and shook myself off to clean.

I’ve never understood the desire to escape to somewhere warm:
Tora Tora, Hawaii, beaches the color of boredom,
the pale under a bikini I would never wear.
Give me a tunnel, let me burrow for grubs and worms.
I’ll walk on all fours, showing off my extravagant footprint.
Hide beneath the dark lanes of my stripes,
dose in a chamber of bracken and fresh grass.

And if none of this is possible, I would again
choose motherhood; this time as a badger with young
born blind and helpless.

I never asked the name of that animal.
I did not take its life, nor commission the trapper,
plunging through unbearable cold to catch it.
But forgive me. I don’t know the chant to exorcise
the animal from my dreams.

The Heart

We perch on short stools
by the small table
in her Russian kitchen
discussing our cats.
The radio cuts in
with the weather forecast,
as if I couldn't predict.
For outside the lace curtains,
windows covered in a film of ice,
patterned like stalks of bamboo,
we see only an endless plain of snow.
The odd dog bounces through it,
as if on a sea of foam.

Even on such days, she says,
my husband would walk
to the open market
to buy fresh heart for the cat.
Heart is all she will eat.

He would bring it home
wrapped in newspaper,
slice it into thin strips,
reassembling it
on a white china saucer,
place it carefully on the floor.
The two of them standing there,
watching while the cat devoured it.

 

 

BIO: Carol V. Davis is the author of Between Storms (Truman State University Press, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg, 2007. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she was the 2008 poet-in-residence at Olivet College, MI and teaches at Santa Monica College, CA. Her poetry has been read on NPR, Radio Russia and at the Library of Congress. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, Verse Daily and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.