William Virgil Davis: “In the Back Yard”
IN THE BACK YARD
The black birds strut through the high grass
across the yard toward the old abandoned shed
near the neighboring property line. They stop
to snack on grubs and crumbs, then resume
their awkward stalk, as if they know where they
are going. Smaller birds flit and flutter above
them, alight, then set off again so quickly they
seem not to have touched the ground. One
small blue towel flags in the wind and a basket
of red and white flowers hangs from a metal
pole. Who would imagine that, inside the house,
someone is dying, or that I could sit here silent,
watching and waiting, waiting and watching?
William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New. He has published five other books of poetry: The Bones Poems; Landscape and Journey, which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry; Winter Light; The Dark Hours, which won the Calliope Press Chapbook Prize; One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, The Nation, Malahat Review, New Criterion, PN Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Yale Review, among many others.