American Life in Poetry

Twenty years ago my wife and I had visitors from New York, and their car broke down on a country road about a mile from our home. One of them panicked because there were no phone booths from which to call for help. Nebraska is a place where there can be a lot of room between one land-line and the next. Carol V. Davis of California did a residency at Homestead National Monument, and this is one of the poems that came out of it.

Animal Time

       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.