Audio Selections from "Alchemies of Loss"

Kimberly Davis' poetry chapbook, Alchemies of Loss, from Bare Cove Press, is now available for ordering online in hardcover or softcover edition: PURCHASE NOW. 


To hear Davis reading a selection of poems from Alchemies of Loss (Poems: "After Sunset," "Stone Angels," "Alchemy," "Visions"), click the following link:

Audio Selections from Alchemies of Loss


"Visions" appeared in Cairn #45 (2010); "Alchemy" appeared in the Mid-American Review, Vol. XXX, Nos. 1 & 2 (2010), and was the winner of the 2009-2010 James Wright Poetry Award.

Apples, Angels

I realized today

it was fourteen years

since I last saw you

and yet you are

as real to me now

and nearly as close

your embracing presence

I walked

to the graveyard

though not the one where

you are buried in upstate New York--

I thought you'd enjoy

the weeping angel

behind the church

her girlish shoulders

bent over the headstone

of someone named Hooper

her wings adroop.

Then we went

to the little grocery downtown

where we discussed

whether to wash the pesticides

from the glowing Washington apples

or buy the pathetic organic ones

from Chile.  You worried

about such things.

You still do.

Photograph used by permission of John Hooper Dean (jack@ourweepingangel.org). Apples, Angels is included in Kimberly Davis' new chapbook, Alchemies of Loss.

Four AM

and I find myself again

in the church

of the dark hours, coffee

and preternatural awareness

like a cat's eye-shine. Everything

is still,

so still and quiet, except for

steam and scent escaping

the glass carafe.  The blackness all around,

sentient, permeable--like a membrane

I could plunge my hand through

and bring back

a red rose, a handful of dirt.  Above the table,

a lamp.  Out of porous night

I have carved

this small

room of light.

Away

The moon holds her head

in her blue hands--

How could you be so foolish?

She is referring to the casual

remark I made to the wrong person.

Her cheek rolls through wisps

of white clouds, chiding me, but then

forbearing.  She knows, like her

I'm better at reflection,

a bit dim in the moment.

My mood will lift

if I follow her out

across stubbled fields

where we can hide

in the branches of bare trees

and no one needs

say anything

King Alfreds, First Light

The King Alfred daffodils lean into the light.

Pink! says the light, and Orange!

The sunlight opens like a speaker, with jokes.

The daffodils tolerate him. In an hour

he will shine them an earnest yellow.

And so they lean--how far I never noticed,

like fishing poles with yellow lures

or cups on sticks dipping for yellow in a well,

like bugles blowing after a yellow note.

Blowing for the forsythia, the crocus.

Early spring lets in a spill of blue, a dab of white,

squills, snowdrops--but only as counterpoint,

only to invent a purer yellow.

Yellow that aches with its lack of irony.

Yellow that is more a belief in color

than the color itself, fall's dying

muted golds purified and resurrected.

What endures after the winter is yellow.

Why can't my daffodils be more like the tulips?

Late-risers!--agnostics standing straight up,

pleased with any color so long as it can go to a party,

lipstick reds and cocktail-bar purples, tulips in green throats,

tulips sporting frilly petals, we're talking tulips. 

People say the daffodils are happy. They're wrong.

Just look at how they crane their yellow selves,

straining on arched green stems, searching, wounded, soulful--

kings of trying to understand.

This poem appeared in Nimrod International Literary Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 ("The Healing Arts," Spring/Summer 2006).

Tree

It seems now

that I have never believed

in the unyielding nature

of physical objects. How strange

that you could stretch out

on the floor, for example,

and not fall through,

or lean against a wall

for hours, going nowhere.

How easily the mind tips sideways

and plunges into

what's hidden back there--

the colonies of military mice

the secret crawlspaces.

I imagine the centers of trees

as hollow luminous chambers

within which dust motes swirl

glinting in moonlight.

How, then, could one so suddenly

have stopped his car?

Some things the mind simply refuses.

But perhaps he did break through

to unite with

the sparkling dust,

the circling breeze

lifting him up, up.

"Tree" appeared in Cairn, no. 42 (2007).

Grief Redecorated Your House

This I will say for grief. It made everything new.

Were you tired of your clothing? Wished for

a new suit or blouse?  How

can you wear a new blouse

in the presence of grief?

A new blue blouse.

How could you? How

could you even care

what color?  Were you bored

with your furniture, of living

with the same sofa year after year. Grief

redecorated your house

with outrage.  Nothing

was the same, not the paint

on the walls, not the walls themselves

not the atoms holding up the walls

in all that empty space.

This poem appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, vol. 20 (2008).

Elegy for an Upstate New York Coffee Shop

A front door that stirs harness bells, brass

coat hooks a scrap of history, kittens

posing with oranges in dimestore frames--

because somebody once really did like kittens.

Formica counters not made to look like stone

and butter that pours off my English

in large unselfconscious drops.

                                                   Slowly

these places are being erased

beneath spray bottle and damp rag--

a soul     worn away

              a feeling    passing    like breath

                            across dry toast--

Where has it gone?

The authenticity of food that is there

only to be food

the western omelette    the grilled cheese--

                                                      I want

this stuff to fill me up

so that I don't forget    when I go back

to the place I live now.

The thing that is dying

                                                    is in me.

Fever

"Never forget you are my children"

--Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris ("Early Darkness")

There are words for this:

Bacillus, the rod-shaped bacteria,

virus, phage from the Greek

meaning one who devours.

At night the colonies encrust the valleys

and pearl the bays.

So you meant to be inhospitable?

There is no thought,

only a natural response

to a disturbance of the membranes--

obstruction of the marshes

congestion of carbon in the air.

And so the temperature will rise . . .

Just for a time

to dislodge

the unwanted visitors

showing us

showing you?

what we are.

Never forget, you are my children.

I brought you here to be my eyes.

Why can you not see this?

You wish us to imagine

we are not your chosen ones.

I would choose you if I could

but that way lies suicide--do you wish to destroy

every living thing?

And so we must suffer.

You will always suffer;

it is your way.

Yet in return

In return you give us nothing.

I give you

the hurricane's cold eye.

"Fever" appeared in WEI, an international journal on women and the environment based in Toronto, in no. 74/75 (Spring/Summer 2007).

Prayerstone

When she was ten and her father lay

pallid and curled in a bed

that buckled at the waist and knees

she went to her room and

hugging herself, set her will

against his death like two hands

braced on the boulder they'd seen

near Lake Placid. Kidney-shaped,

the great rock stood

in an open field, lichens slowly

inscribing blue-green and mustard

circles on its face and shoulders.

"An erratic," they said, explaining

nothing. Determined to budge it

she was determined, if only an inch.

An inch was all her father required

to free his life from the musty vault

under that granite slab,

a fissure she would open

with the fervency of her mind.

No mere prayer was this.

After he died she felt

not that she had been too weak

but that her resolve had faltered,

betrayed by thoughts

which could already imagine him gone.

How they tugged at her hands

like little children

peeling back her fingers

one by one. Then she remembered,

water had carried that stone

lifted it and carried it

all the way from Quebec

nestled in the body

of a frozen sea:

A miraculous voyage.

An earlier version of this poem appeared in Nimrod International Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 ("The Healing Arts," Spring/Summer 2006).

Unknown

Prickle and shim of nape

and skin; the feeling

enters

like an intruder

at the June wedding

of some limpid girl

or today packing

our footfalls bounding

room to empty room

unfastened with the furniture.

We aren't moving

only re-sanding the floors.

Still, in our seventh year

of marriage

there are moments

we shift nearer

our unknown selves

who we once were

or never will be again

in another's gaze.

They brush past us

lifting up the fine hairs.

This poem appeared in Nimrod International Literary Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 ("The Healing Arts," Spring/Summer 2006).

Thumbprint on Estate Papers

A colabrown whorl I had to taste

on what are now your estate papers--

yes, you were eating chocolate

on a hot day. How like you

who spent the money Dad left

on what's-his-name and all those gowns

still ballroom dancing in my closet,

chiffon and feathers swinging on hangers

in the dark each time I shut the door.

As you were dying you reverted

to the maddening innocence of a child,

asked what you'd done to deserve such pain.

"I've been a good girl," you cried.

You weren't.  Careless and charming

as your own mother who abandoned you,

left you to trail behind your grandfather--

the grizzled lineman for the power company.

Every summer he shaved the lower forty

with a rusty tractor he let you drive.

At your funeral the aunts told how

you once left it rolling to chase a moth,

but I picture you riding high,

rattling and shaking atop baler and rake,

clanking over the scraggy ground--

you double-clutch with bare dirty feet,

your toes spreading to reach the pedals,

jouncing on your patched jeans seat.

At the end of the pass I see you spin

the thin iron wheel with the cool delight

of a sportscar driver, half out of control,

swerving around, and then reeling true

to a plan so absurdly larger than you--

a perfect thumbprint from three miles up.

A shorter version of this poem appeared in The Iowa Review, vol. 29, no. 3. In its current form, this poem won First Prize in Poetry and The Benefactor's Prize at the 2007 Whidbey Island Writers Conference.