Last week I snowshoed down the ridge a ways to where a paved road crosses (the Skelp road, for you locals), beyond which Brush Mountain rises another hundred feet or so in a mildly spectacular fashion. It’s a good time of year to trespass on neighboring properties, since the last deer season ended in mid-January and no one is out. Looking at the view, I realized that it included the house of one of Pennsylvania’s best and most prominent eco-poets, my friend Todd Davis. Long-time Via Negativa readers will remember his poems featured here over the years. I jotted down a quick poem on my iPhone and emailed it to him (because, Mennonite that he is, he doesn’t have a smart phone) the next morning, along with this photo:
dear Todd
snowshoeing down
the ridge yesterday I saw
under the snow a mountain
and under the mountain your subdivision
your undivided vision
landscape with poet I think
smiling to myself
as if there could be
any other kind
Yesterday Todd’s seventh full-length poetry collection Coffin Honey officially entered the world. Since I have an advanced reading copy (thanks, Todd!) I am here to tell you that it includes some of his best, and darkest, work to date. Here’s a sample.
The Book of Miracles
Despite Ursus’s approach
the fawn remains curled, delicate
calligraphy attempting to mimic
crinkleroot and leafduff.
Like a held breath, the disguise
falters, and the stream’s clapping
masks the bear’s shuffled gait.
With three nails, Ursus opens
the book of miracles and reads
the fawn’s newly written muscle:
ink the color of ginseng berries,
taste like copper wounded with salt.
The book of miracles, when recited,
sounds like tendon and cartilage
cracked, snap of shoulder moving
out of joint, slurp of marrow.
Before any of this, the heart,
sweetest and most joyous of meat,
is purchased by the mouth
with singing groans.
Such holy books aren’t new.
Ursus himself was resurrected
by the light that grows each day,
that causes everything to climb
upon the back of another
and eat until full.
What’s left of the fawn
doesn’t squirm in his belly,
but as Ursus sleeps, the doe-mother
forages where she left her child:
nipples aching, rivulets of milk
running down slender legs.
Until Darkness Comes
A 100-year-old gray and ductile iron foundry in Somerset, PA, has issued a closing notice to workers, according to local reports.
The white blades turn the sky: red-
eyed turbines blinking away the danger
of flying things. Small children float up
over the Alleghenies, parents chasing
the dangling ropes of weather balloons.
It’s hard to predict when a storm may blow through.
A boy huddles by a bedroom window, wonders
if his father knows where every deer hides
on the mountain. It’s his job to pull the sled
when his father makes a kill. He’s been taught
in school the wind that circles the blades carries
electricity to the towns where steel was made.
Three years ago his sister disappeared in the clouds,
heat lightning like veins in the sky. She sends a letter
once a month with a weather report and money
their mother uses for an inhaler. Most of the coal dust
has settled, but fires burn on the drilling platforms
and the prehistoric gas smells like the eggs that spoil
in the hutch when the hens hide them.
The boy never wants to leave this place.
Everything important is buried here: his grandparents,
a pocket knife he stole from his best friend, the eye-teeth
of an elk he found poached at the bottom of a ravine.
Yesterday in the barn a carpenter ant drilled a hole.
The boy bent to the sawed-circle and blew into it,
breath forced down into darkness. He dreams each night
of a horse galloping from a barn, mane on fire
like a shooting star. He prays for a coat sewn from pigeon
feathers, for small wings to fly over the tops of trees
where the children land when their balloons begin to wilt.
On summer evenings barn swallows careen like drones,
gorging dragonflies that skim the swamp.
The birds’ blue shoulders cant and angle, breast
the color of the foundry’s smokestacks as they crumble
beneath wrecking balls and bulldozers, extinguishing
the mill fires the boy’s grandfather never dreamt
would go out.
Watershed
When you go deep, following a winding river to its source,
you’re soon bewildered, wandering a place beyond knowing.
Hsieh Ling-Yün
Questions between branches roost in hemlocks along the stream.
Growing upward into the skull, the orange ghost of porcupine teeth scores the tree’s cartilage.
Answers unravel in creases, like the yellow yarn of witch-hazel flowers: folds folding over into narrowing passes.
This is the only way through.
A hundred thousand years ago the currents of an inland sea erected a sandstone altar.
If you look at the winding gap, the striations become clear.
As Ursus climbs higher, the stream winnows, speaking the names of the dead.
On the other side of the mountain, water flows in the opposite direction.
Sitting Shiva
If you find the bones of a bear, sit down and stay with them.
The dead desire our company. Touch each one—scapula,
tibia, ulna—even the tiniest bones of the hind and forefeet,
the curve of every claw. Just out of sight, a thrush will sing.
Bird song is a way to speak in secret. Find comfort
in the arbutus that whitens each March on the old logging road.
Wait until dark. A full moon will rise from the bear’s skull,
showing what she thought of us. Hold the moon-skull in your lap,
stroke the cranial ridges. You may see your dead father
scaling the talus to the blueberry field where this bear ate,
mouth sated and purpled by the sweetest fruit. Your mother
will be in the room on the second floor of the house, packing
and then unpacking a box of your father’s clothes. It’s hard
to give up this life. But we must. Others are waiting behind us.
***
Here’s the publisher’s description:
In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem in Coffin Honey seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the twenty-first century. As with his past prize-winning volumes, Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to that of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”
Order Coffin Honey directly from the publisher or wherever new books are sold. Visit Todd’s website for links to all his books. Then go for a walk.
