Look back:
Todd Davis
As part of our "Look Back" series, we're sharing some of our favorite pieces from previous Chautauqua contributors. In this edtion, we're sharing three poems from Todd Davis. Be sure to check out our interview with him to learn about the craft and expereinces that inspired these poems.
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Table Of Contents
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"Foot Washing," originally published in issue 18
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"Missing Boy," originally published in issue 9
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"Urus Grows Wings," originally published in issue 17
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If you want to read the full issues, you can purchase them here.
"Foot Washing" by Todd Davis
She flinches when he caresses her foot, rubs thumb
over ridged callus grown like a furrow through a summer
of no shoes. Weeds hoed, corn and beans picked.
Each year her mother buys one pair of shoes to last
the frozen ground from November to April. The last two
she outgrew before the first violet. With a butcher knife,
her father cut away the toe-box so she wouldn’t blister.
The minister tells her to think on the savior pouring water
from a pitcher, dust clouding the basin with a muddy plume.
We must shed the world, he says. The girl wonders why
you’d want to be rid of the only home you have.
In the pink of May, with feet bared, she loves the earliest
strawberries, grown of bull frogs, the pulsing, high-pitched
call of spring peepers when the ice goes out of the pond,
which sounds like a hundred young chickens frightened by a fox.
This man her parents trust recites the story of the woman
who washed Christ’s feet with tears, anointed them with nard
and dried them with her long black hair. This morning
on the way to church at the river’s edge she rubbed sand
over soles, trying to erase the stains of fieldwork, afraid
of the strong smell of sweat, the manure she shuttles
from the stalls in the barn. And now she shakes as he wipes
the top of her foot, his fingers brushing her ankle bone.
Nobody but her mother has ever touched her feet.
"Missing Boy" by Todd Davis
I do not
want my son
to enter
the den
of sorrow.
At sixteen
he already
knows
too much
of the world.
Like a pine
snake,
he slides
toward his
burrow,
leaves behind
the skin
of his former
self.
It sloughs
and curls,
scales
of what
he’s learned
but now believes
he does not
need.
"Urus Grows Wings" by Todd Davis
Ursus’s body commands he eat,
to rake bushels of apples
from orchard trees and gorge
upon the night-dark sweetness
of the last blackberry. He craves
the sharp lemon of sorrel, acorn
meal upon the tongue, breath ripe
with the smashed ferment
of hawthorn.
Ursus climbs an ancient tulip
poplar that rots from the inside out.
Near the peak a hole to crawl through,
to slide down into a pit, a sacristy
where he can sleep and dream
of what he came into this world
knowing. Ursus can’t explain,
but his heart feels like a boat
about to capsize, immigrants
tumbling over the bow, some
drowning in the surf.
In his torpor Ursus struggles
to find the stars he’s been taught
signify him. The animal of his throat
aches for a prayer that might hold
back the seconds, sky collapsing
into darkness.
Where constellations swim
Ursus assumes a dead man’s float,
exhales a final breath, and sinks
beneath the amniotic tide. As he sleeps
he feels a sharp stab at the shoulder,
vision of wings sprouting—axillars,
patagium, coverts of the upper wing
and tail—all springing from air.
And tracked through, struts
and trusses, the scaffolding for flight,
because he may be at sea for years,
like those pelagic birds that glide
over shore, never coming to rest
upon land.
He can’t be sure if the dark
has receded, snail drawing its head
into a spiraled shell. It’s the whine
of a saw that wakes him. Smell
of burning oil like feathers in flame.
Ursus scrambles upward
from a raven’s dream and leaps
from the hole before the poplar
can fall. In his flying he looks down
at a man who cuts a final notch,
steering this tree to earth. He jerks
head up toward branch-crash
and watches Ursus, arms spread,
slide down the trunk
of a neighboring oak.
Claws can write history, but
it’s the black body loping
unsteadily into a grove of beech
that presses the human mind:
those last leaves to go, copper-
gold, like the light that shines
around the heads of saints, vestigial
wings flapping at their backs.