Blue World
I’d been walking in the twinkling world
left by last night’s ice storm when,
at the edge of a farmer’s field,
I glimpsed blue smoke.
Or so I thought.
Approaching closer, I realized that
bushy bare branches, ice-encased,
had gathered light from the late
winter-early-spring sky, holding
it like a glass globe, fragile and rare,
for me to find.
Blue truth moved through me,
breaking me apart like a ship’s prow,
parting ice at the pole, leaving
white shards afloat on azure waves.
Awake now, I walked back down
the empty bike trail, sight restored.
At the pond, I observed tiny gleams
in the trees, like the last remaining
Christmas strings, winking, whispering,
“All’s the world’s blue for you.”
One Step
How can death be so alive?
I ask, striding through coppery leaf-rot
to pass through the portal of woven
branches into the darkness of the gorge.
After last night’s rain, we step carefully,
the deciduous canopy diminished,
its evidence everywhere underfoot,
silence and solitude the beating heart.
At the fork where yesterday we
turned back at the threat of storm,
today we go on, cliffs on our left,
sun-striped bank to the right.
When it looks as if we can go no farther,
we descend rain-slick wooden steps
to stand at last beside singing stream.
Ahead we see a dappled bank. Treed
on either side, it’s no less a door
than the boughed arch at the glen’s
other end, openings to another world
that tells a story of an earth without
humans and their explosive emotions.
Between water’s murmur
and dark clefts’ deep listening
I envision it all without us
and am one step closer
to letting it all go.
Ed Davis has immersed himself in writing and contemplative practices since retiring from college teaching. Time of the Light, apoetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His novel The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014) won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. Many of his stories, essays and poems have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Sky Island Journal, Write Launch, The Plenitude and Slippery Elm. He lives with his wife and three cats in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio.
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