DRIVING ON HWY. 31, SUMMER LAKE, OR

Rounding a bend, it wasn’t the black ice
that startled me from tedium, but the white church

perched on the hillside, no road, no driveway, no trees.
Just scrub low to the ground, bleached of color.

No cross on its roof bearing the promise of heaven.
No sign declaring its allegiance.

Abandoned by the mother church
or too few locals to support it?

Its pastor lured to a city where pews can fill,
a flock to follow his sermons.

The front façade, a ghostly presence.
Not even a handle on its double doors.

Can a person ever find salvation?

A cardboard cutout, its generations of stories
locked inside or thrust out,

strewn across this desolate two-lane highway,
as lumber trucks roar by, scattering pebbles in their wake.

 

 

 

 

 

SINGLE CELL SCIENTIST 

At first when she asked for help with her scholarly paper,
I did not understand the words I translated, even though
they were in a language I know, but the Latin names
meant nothing: prokaryote, eukarote, protist.

                                           *

Daylight was shrinking, the Neva River patched with ice.
November, two months into a year’s stay in Russia.
The sun disappearing under a mantle of gray.

                                           *

Even with only one chromosome, the prokaryotes
can thrive in extreme environments.
Never having lived in a snowy climate would not be an obstacle.

                                           *

The scientist invited me to her work, greeted me
on the icy sidewalk to usher me past guards stomping
against the cold by the entrance of the Zoological Museum
(a former palace like much of St. Petersburg).

                                           *
Up and down dingy staircases, barely lit
(I’d never make it out on my own while my passport,
stored in a shoebox at the university, awaited registration.)

                                          *

In the back of the 19th c. museum, she pushed open
a door heavy enough to withstand the storming of the Winter Palace.
Her office crammed with four others (anti-Semites the scientist whispered).

                                          *

She motioned me to her microscope, pushed a chair under me.
A rod-shaped prokaryote was doing laps back and forth over the glass slide.

BIO: Carol V. Davis latest book is Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017). 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.