Pam Davenport
I Write this Ghazal So I Won’t Have to Think about What’s Really Happening
What bliss there is in blueness. ~Vladimir Nabokov
Blue dawn air, blue rooftops, the hazy hour, nothing is sharp—
giant violet mums, my attempt at adornment, are obscured by neighbors’ blue tarp.
I have let my neighbors vex me, not complained of gunshots and fires—
now all I see, their carport and a card table, a few boxes, hidden behind askew tarp.
Fine shelter at construction sites for dry wall or cement or a home after a hurricane—
in a tent on a rainy night I have said grace for the loan of a nearly-new tarp.
Civil War soldiers carried bibles in tarred haversacks—
but this isn’t war, just a flapping plastic to ruin my view tarp.
The beauty of blue, of tzitzit, olivewing, of a velvet dress my mother sewed—
Picasso’s guitar, indigo mood, silk surging over a thigh, or a mildewed tarp.
Oxygen, being blue, if we could see it, like seawater or mountain sky—
Izu’s photos, bodies covered in cobalt cyanotype, yet I eschew this tarp.
My yellow wallpaper, the beating of an old man’s heart, cadmium—
my trigger could be my bliss, ‘tis nothing, Davenport, but a tattered blue tarp.
Pam Davenport writes in the deserts and mountains of Arizona. She earned an MFA at Pacific University in Oregon, and her chapbook, A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith (2019), was chosen as the winner of the Slipstream Chapbook Competition. Pam has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was recipient of the Arizona Authors’ Association Annual Award for Poetry. Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Nimrod, Tinderbox, Slippery Elm, Poetry of the American Southwest, Chiron, New Verse News, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review.
Return to November 2021 Edition
What bliss there is in blueness. ~Vladimir Nabokov
Blue dawn air, blue rooftops, the hazy hour, nothing is sharp—
giant violet mums, my attempt at adornment, are obscured by neighbors’ blue tarp.
I have let my neighbors vex me, not complained of gunshots and fires—
now all I see, their carport and a card table, a few boxes, hidden behind askew tarp.
Fine shelter at construction sites for dry wall or cement or a home after a hurricane—
in a tent on a rainy night I have said grace for the loan of a nearly-new tarp.
Civil War soldiers carried bibles in tarred haversacks—
but this isn’t war, just a flapping plastic to ruin my view tarp.
The beauty of blue, of tzitzit, olivewing, of a velvet dress my mother sewed—
Picasso’s guitar, indigo mood, silk surging over a thigh, or a mildewed tarp.
Oxygen, being blue, if we could see it, like seawater or mountain sky—
Izu’s photos, bodies covered in cobalt cyanotype, yet I eschew this tarp.
My yellow wallpaper, the beating of an old man’s heart, cadmium—
my trigger could be my bliss, ‘tis nothing, Davenport, but a tattered blue tarp.
Pam Davenport writes in the deserts and mountains of Arizona. She earned an MFA at Pacific University in Oregon, and her chapbook, A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith (2019), was chosen as the winner of the Slipstream Chapbook Competition. Pam has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was recipient of the Arizona Authors’ Association Annual Award for Poetry. Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Nimrod, Tinderbox, Slippery Elm, Poetry of the American Southwest, Chiron, New Verse News, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review.
Return to November 2021 Edition