Night’s Black Weight
By Todd Davis, associate professor of English


Originally published in the journal Blueline XXI (Spring 2000), Associate Professor of English Todd Davis’ “Night’s Black Weight” exemplifies his nature writing in poetry – and the kind of work he hopes to inspire his students to do in the course Creative Writing and the Natural World. Said Davis, “I truly do see my writing – both the poetry and the scholarship – as part of my teaching. There is no artificial boundary or division between the two.”

From Aug. 20 to 27, Davis and Associate Professor of Biology Mary Linton led a small group of students to North Manitou Island in the Lake Michigan Archipelago to work on nature writing. The week was designed, Davis said, for sleeping in tents, hiking and writing every day and cooking their own meals “under what we hope are blue skies and starry heavens.”

Todd Davis imageNight’s Black Weight
For Don and Punky Fox
						
That summer, living where the pasture sloped   
down to a stream, we listened to beaver felling
trees in the early, dark hours before dawn—
dragging, digging, deliberating over the placement
of limbs like work on a loom, making a home
from water even the cows ignored.
   
In time, we saw our low land turned to marsh, 
our stream to pond: mudpack running thirty feet 
across, spread wide like a rag-blanket, made
of maple and mulberry and birch branches
stitched together.
   
Towards the end of August, when we first noticed
the days growing short, Canadian air dipping south,
we came at dusk to watch them swim with the ease
of falling locust leaves, and just after sunset,
as the moon began its slow ascent, they moved
from the water, began their work, accepting
the miracle of night’s black weight—soft light
gathered to their bodies, coats dark and glistening,
gliding under a blanket of stars.
   
Blueline is published at the State University of New York College at Potsdam; 
information available on the Web at www.potsdam.edu/ENGL/blueline/default.html. 
Contact Todd Davis at toddfd@goshen.edu.

Return to September Bulletin contents
About this Issue – A Goshen College book club?
In Praise of Faculty
Salsa: A Taste of Hispanic Culture
Coffee Break
Berman's Lament
Anansi Borrows Money
Sexuality: God's Gift
Roll It: GC Alums strike success in soap box racing and celluloid

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