Inching towards November
still no rain, this fifth year of drought.
My husband too is parched.
His language withering,
sometimes a drip, sometimes a deluge.
The other day he meant ‘frontier,’
only it burst out as ‘furniture,’
accompanied by a storm of anger.
As his abilities creak backwards,
I picture him at eight, puppy-like,
his body not yet grown into his jutting
ears, front teeth too big, with a father
who demanded to be worshiped
by everyone, even his own children,
a mother who wished she were Boston
Brahmin, not from immigrant stock.
Am I now the depository of his memories?
Our own children have taken on
roles they don’t deserve: having to shave
him, take him for a walk.
A torrent of sorrow.
CAROL V. DAVIS is the author of Below Zero (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023), Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017), and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize 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 Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and Antioch Univ. Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed because of COVID-19 restrictions, and now canceled.