I Was Building Up To Something
by Susan Davis

Editors: Ricki Mandeville, Michael Miller

ISBN: 978-0-9839651-0-7

$15.00

Susan Davis' book has the indelible yet understated quality of certain great photographs. Sharp edges of narrative, clarity of emotion, distinct images in declarative sentences, the velvet, gradated shadows of loss, unpredictable rhythms of violence and tenderness in country life and family life: from the precisions of that exacting surface rise the mysteries of life itself, caught in the trigger-slices of these urgent, concentrated poems. – Robert Pinsky

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Davis’s poetry reflects a birth in Louisiana, a childhood in upstate New York and stints in the giant states of Texas and Alaska. She now resides in California with her husband and directs under- graduate creative writing at University of California, Irvine. Her poem “The Season Begins in a Waiting Room” was chosen for the 2010 Rebecca Lard Poetry Award, and the poem “Farm Days” was installed on wind screens at the Lake June transit station in Dallas in November of 2010. She is the mother of two daughters.

Undertaking

She had to wash away
the black silt
worked into his pores, into
the wrinkles around his eyes
that made him look older
than his 47 years.
She walked his naked length
on the table at her waist
where she kneaded dough,
where she told the men to place him.
She had given them the children
and made them all leave.
She took her time.
By lantern-light, she washed each finger,
cleaning underneath the nail with
a splinter sheathed in cotton.
She started once to wrap him
in a blanket.  He was so cold.
She found a mole on his hip
she never knew was there.
I thought he would have liked
to have her find the mole like this
when he was still alive.

I said to you
when the husband died,

The way it’s done now,
they make her leave the room,
leave the body with a stranger
who zips it up in a plastic bag,
tags it like a specimen,
puts this warm sweet body
in a drawer.
They let a stranger handle you
that one last time.
They would have to drug me.
They would have to drag me away.

Remember how I told you that?