Cortney Davis is one of the state’s finest poets.
“Her voice is tender, thoughtful and tough, her gaze focused, penetrating, and always curious about our shared human forms and conditions,” says Naomi Shihab Nye about Davis’ forthcoming book, “Taking Care of Time,” winner of the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize from Michigan State University’s Poetry Center.
Also a writer in several other genres, Davis who lives in Bethel, draws much of her inspiration from her work as a nurse practitioner. She has won many awards for her writing, including three American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Awards; the Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Award; a gold medal Benjamin Franklin Book Award; and the CT Center for the Book’s nonfiction prize.
She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the CT Commission on the Arts, has been featured on NBC and NPR, has read her work and conducted workshops throughout the country and has been featured in numerous anthologies and journals, the latter including Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New York Times, Crazyhorse, Ms., Massachusetts Review, and Rattle.
— CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin,
Simple Eternity
A homeless man arrives on the Feast of the Epiphany
in jeans and a flannel shirt, arms and legs all a-jangle.
He hesitates in front of the baby doll that is meant to be Christ,
newly born and lying in a manger.
All around stand the saints: St. Patrick and his shamrock;
Mary with her heart pierced by a sword; and, over on the right,
Christ, one hand pointing to his heart, the other hand beckoning.
In the background, the noises of Norwalk—fire sirens that clang
and wail; the chatter of children in the church vestibule.
I envy the man, and the old women praying in their black shawls,
how, at noon, as we wait for the priest, they stand to intone the Angelus.
I respond with the others, those who see in the flickering flames
what I cannot. And at Communion I follow the faithful to the altar rail
where the baby stares up with his blue glass eyes,
and the homeless man kneels beside me, his belief so keen it casts
a nimbus around his hair, like the halo worn by the infant Christ,
and I wonder if the Body and Blood that I accept might transform me too,
unveil the simple Eternity in all this plaster and noise.
Then It Was Simple
You walked up Sylvandell Drive
on the coldest night. Soon, Father would be home,
easing the gray Plymouth into the one-car garage,
and Mother, who was always home,
would be cooking meatloaf with its two
sizzling strips of bacon. Snow stung your face,
snow crunched beneath your boots and the glow
from Pittsburgh’s steel mills hung in the sky.
In such a place, in 1955, Mary could appear to you
casually, leaning out the neighbor’s window,
a blue domestic angel with a movie star face,
round arms crossed on the sill, her brown hair
in a friendly page boy. She smiled, you smiled back,
your sled tugging behind you,
grounding you, and the frozen snow and the whirl of gravity
holding you, and Mary,
as if she were not from another world,
so happy to see you.
The Brightest Star Is Home
Driving home tonight after a good dinner,
you call that bright star to the right of the moon
Venus, but I say it’s so far away
it might as well be home — that place where I was a child
and Father and I walked in the yard
as you and I did this afternoon before the bookstore,
where we spent too much, and the restaurant.
He would part the spiny ferns, move aside the violet mushrooms
to show me where elves slept in the cupped hands
of hollyhock. That place
where Mother ironed in a mist of steam
or gardened in a green straw hat, the summer night
falling over me like one of her fragrant scarves,
stars punched out of the dark like the bright holes
we poked in jelly jar lids so fireflies could breathe.
That place where Disney beckoned
from the small screen TV, the castle exploded
in black and white
and Mother and Dad laughed
with Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle
as if they were uncles from out of town.
And bedtime (like now, when you and I move
in our silent rituals) was God’s time,
when He might take me or leave me, and my last words
were offered to the night light and the universe,
my parents’ footfall carrying them away
as if anywhere they were without me
was another galaxy—like that bright star you named Venus,
but, driving through the dark tonight, I pretend
might be that lost place I once called home.
The Smoke We Make Pictures Of
Wrapping presents, I look up
and see the clock in the mirror,
how it seems to tick backwards.
In the living room, gifts unwrap,
ribbons recoil on their spools;
my life peels like a time-lapse flower.
I haven’t yet met you.
My first marriage falls apart,
my children’s legs telescope into their bodies
and they scamper away, curl
like the ends of unused ribbon.
I feel them drawn into me; my water,
splashed at the doctor’s shoes, gathers
and the sack seals. For a moment
I think we could start again,
but the hands click back,
the cells of my children shrink
into droplets. Sperm swim, frantic,
and disappear into my husband.
I am free. My hair grows long,
I’m in college throwing water balloons―
they explode, spray rises
and settles like sequins.
Now I’m in my yard in Pittsburgh,
the sprinkler waves a shimmering barrier,
my bare feet print the grass.
Father, just balding,
laughs and lights a cigarette.
Mother, tall and pretty in her housedress,
her dark glasses black as night,
comes out with Zipper. He wags his tail
and smacks his jaws at the mist falling.
I’m so happy I want to stop the hands,
but they inch back and I’m three, sitting
by the mantle, Father snapping a Kodak
as I frown up, waiting for Santa.
I don’t know that Mother’s just home
from the doctor, her lung cradling
its dark spot, returned from the jar
where it will rest thirty years later.
Father’s arms with their spotty freckles
rewind the film, undoing the knot of cancer
drifting in his colon, scattering the pages
of the novel he wants to write,
but never will. Then I spiral into myself,
we all disappear into Mother’s angular hips.
Her uterus bulges under the hot fuchsia skirt
my father loved. It’s the weekend he was home
on leave. As they lie pressed together,
he takes back that part of me he will love most:
the way I draw horses with manes flying up
like blackbirds, frightened, rising in unison.
With the final gasp of their union,
I am gone.
Father reaches for a match.
They talk about how I’ll be theirs someday,
and they watch the clock on the bureau
tick, each of them exhaling smoke into air,
clouds they make pictures of. A house
at Christmas. A dog. A little girl.
To a Daughter, Moved Away
At home I scrape stars
from your ceiling,
stars fixed on a vault of blue
when you were ten, in love
with stars and horses,
the way both seemed bright
and out of reach.
Now I do not hear you
calling out in sleep.
You have grown up,
fled to a street
of Victorian houses,
weather-ruined, overrun
with kids on skate boards.
We have said goodnight
in the light of Orion;
overhead, invented nebulae;
spun three planets out of orbit
around your horseshow ribbons.
When you looked beyond your window
you thought the sky was dull.
Tonight, Deneb and Rigel
peel from your ceiling easily.
Through different doorways
we see the light of constellations
cooled into darkness a hundred years.
There is nothing
I wouldn’t do for you.
Everything in Life Is Divided
Everything in life is divided:
twenty-four hours that fade from day to night,
the sand at Martha’s Vineyard, where we vacationed last year,
separating us from the ocean
where we swam, then returned to our blanket,
the two of us making one marriage,
sharing the apple sliced to reveal the identical
black seeds of its surprised face.
Even our bodies can be halved, although less evenly:
lungs partitioned into lobes, the heart’s blood
pumped from right to left, the brain’s two hemispheres
directing our arms, our legs,
our lives into the two possibilities of the Greek mask.
My life’s work, too, is divided—
on one side of my desk, unfinished poems;
on the other, nursing books with dog-eared pages.
Aren’t we all somehow divided?
Like when my daughter was in labor, my first
grandchild emerging into the room’s blue air,
suddenly entering new territory,
and how, when after the delivery my daughter kept bleeding,
I couldn’t look at the newborn in the incubator
but stood fast beside my child, the woman who once
slipped from my life into her own and now had divided herself again
while I balanced in my hands Joy and Fear, cradling them both
until the bleeding stopped.
The Good Nurse
A good nurse kisses her patients when
she says good night. – Elie Wiesel
Our kiss is in gratitude
for rumpled sheets, the hourly
turning of patients. For pillows
placed between legs,
cotton booties pulled over raw heels,
and in thanksgiving
for the patients’ needs:
their thirst quelled
by our cold glass.
Their pain,
sharp and relentless as a bee
charmed by our fingertips.
The kiss has everything to do
with sons who look at us
and disappear, daughters
who line their eyes with blue
and borrow our too-loud laughter.
We want to bind them
in our arms. Instead, we tend
the patient who longs for us.
He knows we will rush to him,
stroking his earlobe, kissing lightly
his eyelid, his cheek ―
not for love,
but for what is constant:
the way skin hurries
to bruise, and the last gaze
freezes the mind.
The Nurse’s Pockets
When patients are told they are dying
they say something simple:
I’ve had a good life or Who will feed my cats?
It seems harder on the doctor—
he waits outside the door, stalling,
until the patient confronts him.
So, Doc, what’s the verdict?
Soon, a nurse comes to bathe the patient.
There is only the sound of water
wrung from the warm washcloth,
the smell of yellow soap
and the way she spends time praising
the valley of his clavicle, his hollow mouth.
Then, a morning when the patient leaves,
taking his body. The nurse finds nothing
but the bed with its depression,
its map of sheets she strips.
In the drawer, gumdrops. A comb
woven with light hair, and a book
with certain pages marked.
She takes all these into her pockets.
She has trunks in every room of her home,
full of such ordinary things.
I Want To Work in a Hospital
where it’s okay
to climb into bed with patients
and hold them —
pre-op, before they lose
their legs or breasts, or after,
to tell them
they are still whole.
Or post-partum,
when they have just returned
from that strange garden,
or when they are dying,
as if somehow because I stay
they are free to go.
I want the daylight
I walk out into
to become the flashlight they carry,
waving it
as we go together
into their long night.
Water Story
I love the living sound of my plant when I water it,
the hiss and suck of agua
pulled through the soil by gravity,
the sweat that appears on the clay pot,
the unwrinkling of the leaves.
I had a patient once, pregnant mother
morning sick and evening sick, who arrived
hauling her children, carrying her bucket.
We slipped a needle in her vein,
dripped saline into her body’s dry core
and, right before me, the woman
plumped up. My ivy overflows —
a thread of water and fertilizer returns to earth
through the sink mouth. I am happy
that all life is circular. Seven months later,
the woman’s chubby boy popped out, head first.
Blood and water flooded the catch basin, spilled over.
I carry this story on my white shoes.
Poems copyright 2017 by Cortney Davis. CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin selects work for CT Poets Corner by invitation.
