Carol V. Davis
Carol V. Davis is the author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body (2017), Between Storms (2012) and won the  2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. her first full-length collection, It’s Time to Talk About… was published in a bilingual Russian/English edition in Russia (1997). Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Ulan-Ude, Siberia, winter 2015 and teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch Univ. Los Angeles. She is poetry editor of the Los Angeles newspaper the Jewish Journal. 


Animal Time

I do better in animal time,
a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk.
In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie,
I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening
through water, even the high-pitched drone of the
cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing.
As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to
Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York,
the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations
of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides.
They camped under stars that meant no harm.
It was the silence that alerted them to danger.
They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked
its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.

 

from Because I Cannot Leave This Body
     Truman State Univ. Press, 2017
  






© 2017 Carol V. Davis
Carol V. Davis was a Featured Poet at the June 2017 Second Sunday Poetry Series