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Column 544

Animal Time

Intro by Ted Kooser
08.23.2015

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.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Carol V. Davis, “Animal Time,” from Harpur Palate, (Vol. 13, No. 1, summer/fall 2013). Poem reprinted by permission of Carol V. Davis and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.