Donald Alfred Davie Poems

A queer thing about those waters: there are no
Birds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.
...

Chemicals ripen the citrus;
There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,
And on the shoreline
Hygiene, inhuman caution.
...

No moss nor mottle stains
My parents' unmarked grave;
My word on them remains
Stouter than stone, you told me.
...

X, whom society's most mild command,
For instance evening dress, infuriates,
In art is seen confusingly to stand
For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.
...

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall
At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal
With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came
...

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then.
The seasonable or more rabid heats
Of love and summer in some other cities
Unseal the all too human: not in his.
...

"stooped to truth and moralized his song"
Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time.
Vernal a little. Primavera. First
...

A queer thing about those waters: there are no
Birds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.

The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone,
A quarry outraged by hulls.
We took pleasure in that: the emptiness, the hardness
Of the light, the silence, and the water's stillness.

But this was the setting for one of our murderous scenes.
This hurt, and goes on hurting:
The venomous soft jelly, the undersides.
We could stand the world if it were hard all over.
...

Chemicals ripen the citrus;
There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,

And on the shoreline

Hygiene, inhuman caution.



Beef in cellophane

Tall as giraffes,

The orange-rancher's daughters

Crop their own groves, mistrustful.



Perpetual summer seems

Precarious on the littoral. We drive

Inland to prove

The risk we sense. At once



Winter claps-to like a shutter

High over the Ojai valley, and discloses

A double crisis,

Winter and Drought.



Ranges on mountain-ranges,

Empty, unwatered, crumbling,

Hot colours come at the eye.

It is too cold



For picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit

Yellow burns on the distance.

The phantom walks

Everywhere, of intolerable heat.



At Ventucopa, elevation

Two-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen,

Deserted or broken settlements,

Gasoline stations closed and boarded.



By nightfall, to the snows;

And over the mile on tilted

Mile of the mountain park

The bright cars hazarded.
...

No moss nor mottle stains
My parents' unmarked grave;

My word on them remains

Stouter than stone, you told me.



"Martyred to words", you have thought,

Should be your epitaph;

At other times you fought

My self-reproaches down.



Though bitterly once or twice

You have reproached me with how

Everything ended in words,

We both know better now:



You understand, I shall not

If I survive you care

To raise a headstone for

You I have carved on air.
...