Entasis

by Chris Davidson

like lids and screws in our hemisphere.
In the Southern, they’ve got spiral variety,
and depending on the continent:
dingo, hyena, or maned wolf.
Dogs and dog-like creatures are where
my inclinations lean—their pack-ness,
their loyalty to leadership.

This has its problems.
A Boy Scout in the Ozarks, I let
the leader take us down an unmapped
path. We found the abandoned cabin
he knew as a kid now occupied
by meth-heads. The dog guarding it
was trained to attack by his master.

That cabin is long-gone: tornadoes.
I assume they turn the same direction
all else up here does, errant tops
spinning right across the regions,
destroying evidence mindlessly.
Those killers won the lottery,
burrowed in the earth like foxes.

by Chris Davidson

We took the island course inland
where hills were split by rain,

where paths of red dirt lay, and roads
were wet and black and windy.

With car parked we heard leaves
brushing against leaves, and later,

the path clinging to our shoes,
we found the car where we left it

and brought back on its floor mats
the land to our hotel room.

Oh well, we said, each to the other,
we didn’t make the volcano.

She’d planned on pushing me in,
she said, which would’ve been

pretty cool, I admitted. In my voice
I hid it, the secret thrill. And then

she jumped my bones—first time
in twenty married years without tears.

by Chris Davidson

As young men crossing the plains, we looked
for what was heard of at one time:
sheltered valley orchards, fresh springs
and fertile soil. What we found instead
were lizards creeping from bush to bush, slow
creatures crushed under the hooves of our stock,
cacti, and water rising up from cracks
in the earth. The water tasted like ash.

When we returned, our wives searched our eyes
for visions, but there was nothing to see.
So we took our places in bed beside them,
sharing in sleep the same dreams, growing
it seemed like vines from our heads
(some would say hearts), but rooted
elsewhere, rising and tangled like vines
binding oaks over a narrow stream.

We found ourselves, we couldn’t say why,
standing in their shade out of the sun, where
you can sense in the nose and on the skin
the thin vein of water feeding all of it.
From a distance, in an otherwise
featureless landscape, the trees are a strip
of green fire, subdued and immovable,
ever burning. A boundary. A scalable wall.