I do better in animal time,
a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk.
In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie,
I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening
through water, even the high-pitched drone of the
cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing.
As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to
Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York,
the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations
of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides.
They camped under stars that meant no harm.
It was the silence that alerted them to danger.
They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked
its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.
written at Homestead National Monument of America, NE
Carol V. Davis is the author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body (2017), Between Storms (2012) and won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Ulan-Ude, Siberia, winter 2018 and was scheduled to return to Siberia as a Fulbright Specialist, Spring 2022. She teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch Univ. Los Angeles. She had two National Parks Service writer-in-residence fellowships: Homestead National Monument of America, NE, Aug. 2011 and Hubbell Trading Post, AZ (in the Navajo Nation), Aug. 2015.
Featured image courtesy the poet
“Animal Time” was previously published in:
Harpur Palate vol. 13, No. 1 (Country Living Issue), Summer & Fall 2013
American Life in Poetry, Dec. 2014
Because I Cannot Leave This Body, State University Press, 2017
