Dusk

It's time to talk about intimacy
because I have walked the back roads
and caught the scent of lilac
in the moment of blossom.
I have watched the stillness of dusk
take hold, so that the dogwood
silences its branches leaving only
the ghostly flowers, iridescent
without benefit of moon.
I who have spent years barricading
come to you without benefit
of language or example, so that
what remains is like the essence
of orange stripped to an elemental form.
We hear the farmer's children swinging
and soon the train will
roar by, but in the nearing dark
shape becomes impossible,
everything is left to trust.
Beyond the fields and highways
I will return to what I left
but it will not be the same
because the quiet of this hour
has swept over us.

Footpath Map

I leaned out an old farmhouse window,
watched as walkers steadied their packs
and set off across a Yorkshire field,
their sport pursued with such seriousness.
How to reconcile the interests
of farmer and pathseeker?
Footpath maps (in little wooden houses)
admonish each hiker:
"Dangerous stiles must be reported."

The wind cut hard as the Yoredale rocks
alternating layers of shale, sandstone and limestone.

We tried to follow such a map,
found ourselves outside a fifteenth century church;
a Swaledale sheep, its wool hung in long knots
like tzitzim, grazed in the cemetery.

Perhaps the graves of children were unsettled
by the rhythmic chewing; the memory of illness
ever circulating in their small bodies.
How in the last hours the hands knew everything,
skin stretched hotter and hotter,
arms distracted by fever.

When we entered that church,
the walls barren and grey,
turned the change over in our palms,
their delicate fingers dropped the coins
one by one into the collection box.

Note: tzitzim are the string fringes worn by Orthodox Jewish men

Bread

I would never be mistaken for a baker
too sloppy with measurements, as with love.
But always the fantasy, like turning off a film.
It's better that way. You can invent any ending,
though not with bread. The directions come with
warnings: too much water means sunken crusts,
too little and the dough won't hold together.
I can never trust things to come out right,
stung too many times.
Daring with inexactitude, I spill flour
like a drunk, measure sugar in my palm.
I check the yeast in rhythmic intervals.
When the bubbles dance on command,
I am amazed. Don't they know I'm a fake?
But it comes back to this:
how my mother brought a fresh loaf
and a bowl of salt to my new house.
Here, this is for you. A blessing.

Danger

I have returned to the landscape
where I broke open in spring.
Seen the first toothwort of
the season, caught the scent
of wild onion and garlic,
folded it carefully to
safeguard the future.
The houses still hold their shape.
I have gone to greet the dog
who barks his way into dusk.
Yesterday caught in a storm
which rose as unexpectedly
as passion in middle age,
I leaned against the rain
into a sky swollen purple,
bruised as a girl's shins,
when I returned home
to reconstruct my life
in the aftermath of love.
I passed fields welling up
with new mustard like
a belly full of heavy cream.
Stopped by the same stubble
of burnt house to inspect
the small pile of bricks,
Here in the ashes
I spit in the evil eye.

Thinking of You in St. Petersburg

for Kate

In the impossible crush of people
collapsing into the only working
escalator at Chernyshevsky Metro
I saw you, could swear it,
even knowing the impossibility.
Luxuriated in the uneven cut
of musty hair circling the back
of the woman’s neck, beige jacket
slung simple and direct.
I longed to touch her on the arm,
to call out Kate!
even as you drape in front
of a class in the Indian summer
of a California autumn,

while we wait for the heat to be
turned on, watch for neighbors
to trade cloth for quilt and fur,
to blindly follow, even as I stumble
for the word for soap for dishes,
watch shop clerks snicker as I
terrorize the language.

Today our first month's anniversary
in St. Petersburg, a celebration with
meringues and Russian chocolates,
three carefully chosen tangerines
(one for each child, to be fair).
Soon it will be winter and the reds
and purples of early fall fruit at
Kuznetchny Market will be overtaken
by fading greens and grays.
Spring slides in late, they say.
I call friends of friends, knowing I
must meet people now, to hoard
for winter,stuffing cheeks and pockets
for warmth, self protective, resourceful.
But if it were you and I let you slip
between the kiosks and the old woman
selling eyeglasses, in what language
will I find you when I return?

^

Biography

Carol V. Davis lives in Los Angeles, California, USA. Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, Ireland and Israel. American magazines include Mid-American Review, Kalliope, Roanoke Review, South Dakota Reviewand anthologies, including Nice Jewish Girls (Plume/Penguin,1996). Irish publications include Cyphers, West 47/Galway Arts Centre and the Stinging Fly. In 1994 she received one of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience (USA) and also won the Reuben Rose Poetry Competition in Israel. In 1995 she won the Black Rock Press Broadside Competition, The Book Arts Press of the Univ. of Nevada. She is the author of a chapbook, Letters From Prague, (Paper Bag Press, 1991) based on the letters of Franz Kafka to his fiancee. She spent the 1996-97 academic year as a senior Fulbright scholar in creative writing in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she taught modern (19th and 20th century) Jewish literature at Petersburg Jewish University and wrote. Her new book, It's Time to Talk About..., was published in St. Petersburg, Russia in November, 1997, in a bilingual edition. In May, 2000 Ireland, she received the Strokestown Poetry Award, 2nd place, Co. Roscommon, Ireland.