Work Confession
Work Confession
I dug a room that sits empty beneath the earth. I ate the last of the potatoes and didn’t get around to canning before the tomatoes and peppers rotted. Like rain on pursed lips, tomorrow will be a feast day with nothing. We don’t drag the river for our dead anymore. The cemetery’s full. Grandma says they’ll rise like a flood. Grandpa says they’ll stay planted and make good soil. It’s too wet to plow. I should’ve spread manure when the ground was still hard. Later today I’ll haul the saw to the meadow where an apple tree fell in an ice-storm. Because the saw’s teeth are dull, I imagine I’ll lay down in new grass, let the sun warm me into a nap. The strong smell of clover covers all my indulgences.
Todd Davis is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems and Coffin Honey, both published by Michigan State University Press. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, Southern Humanities Review, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
