Issue 2:2 | Poetry | Jeff Davis

3 Poems by Jeff Davis

The Bird Returning to Its Nest

(after a painting by George Braque)

Back. Back to the nest,

a cave, a boat

on the sea of earth,

to live in it.

Some haste to the form

of her flight,

she comes

from fields of wheat

& rose hedges

which have filled her wings' shadows.

She might have flown on

nowhere, her eyes cooling

obsidian.

She is tired, but it is more simple.

She does not arc down

for one night only.

She is given:

Like an anchor,

she does not move her wings

into this depth,

this dream

she remembers

as she returns

to the nest and three eggs

empty of everything

but the descent.

---

A Tithe of Clouds

The ridge exacts a tithe of rain

When pilgrim clouds

From the plain of Georgia and the Gulf

Rise, and mass at the mountain gaps

Like flocks, up the high road.

They head north lightened.

The streams sing on their way down.

---

Strata: Rhododendron
For Alan Lynch

*

when the mind vanishes,

the real appears.

… . Learn to see.

Bodhidharma

*

Geography: The Boundary

The granite cliffs

edge zones of life;

the transition between

compressed by the ascent up

steep palisades

into a few miles

as the crow flies

from the low land

(hollies thriving under pines

in simple shadow)

to the ridge crest,

beyond which the light

lingers at dusk in the steep

woods, westward; and reveals

the broad, dark green

leaves, the

rose tree still sunning

in hollows opened by

the winter wind;

buds prolific,

clustered in thickets, it thrives

in the high severity,

clinging to the thin earth

of sky, which remakes

earth constantly

from the gone, the

left that also leaves,

palimpsest life,

lives and deaths,

in the high land,

beyond the boundary of regions.

*

To the forester’s eye

The forest has order

& structure

wrapped in its green veils:

oaks, poplars, pines

the canopy; below

them, dogwoods

white

flowered in the thin

shade of new spring leaves;

hollies beneath, glossy,

and rhododendrons, bud

sheathes still furled, pointed

beyond the end of winter.

*

Blue Ridge

How many million years

kindle in your dark leaf,

Magnolia-born,

magna folia,

older than the rose?

Another chapter of the unknown

from the lush turbulence

before us all

descended, relic,

ancient among those which remain,

through all change:

forty million years

riding the blue ridges as they rise,

as they crumble and subside,

and are again uplifted

still glistening, drenched

in April rain.

*

Green River

(For Karen Eve Bayne)

There must be

water to open the earth

to the digging

root, to ease its entry

deeper.

Here, it wore the land

hollow.

Low willows

watch water slip

over stones

through thick

rhododendron,

tree-rose, kalmia,

laurel wood.

This was your river,

goddess Ishara,

when I came to you lost

in my own thicket of

mind’s perplexity,

and you bathed me

in the torpor of a vivid sleep,

anointed me, joined me

to the body of the land

your river passed through,

took me beyond

myself, and the argument

I let die as it mingled

With the cool air, lost

among the leaves.

You.

And still the stream seeps

through your holy stones down,

scattered in ancient cataclysms ,

scattering currents oceanward

through groves, thickets, ferns, and moss.

*

Gray lichens cover

the rocks,

and beneath the rocks

lifting their difficult bodies from the earth

the roots of everything entwine.

And with them the tunnels

of the mole, the caves

of ants and worms, deep larvae

still asleep, infintessimal arche,

to unravel all the layered complexity

above, and

under, last, within,

Nothing lives - but

in the luminous emptiness

the central stone.

*

The Strategy

In the green time, flower;

hidden amid the taller oaks and pines,

or on the bare bitter crags

in small company, survive;

deliver the magenta

text of rocks,

of the leaves,

long dead,

broken from their limbs,

layered in the rich earth palimpsest

angels of the stones.