A Natural History of the Tribes of Mutant Thoughts: Poems and Doggeral

By Gordon Davis

While practicing law; advocating environmental sustainability and rule of law; and teaching environmental law, rule of law, and democracy building for half a century Gordon Davis privately wrote poetry. Whether pondering his professional journey or grappling with more elusive mysteries, he has leaned on meditative verse and dished up timely dogg

• Language: English
• Publisher: Essex Editions
• Release date: Dec 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781733519007

Gordon Davis

Gordon Davis was born in 1941 in Richmond, Virginia, where he attended the public schools. He is an engineering graduate of Yale University and of the University of Virginia School of Law. His twenty year law practice, first with a Wall Street firm, then as general counsel to the Adirondack Park Agency, then as a private practitioner in the Adirondacks, added an international dimension beginning in 1991, when he served as chief legal officer on a series of sustainable development projects in Russia, China and Mongolia. Thereafter, he directed rule of law programs in China and Hong Kong. He has published and lectured in Asia, Europe and the United States on environmental law, rule of law, democracy building, and other topics. He served as adjunct faculty at the State University of New York (1975-1990), the University of Chicago (2000-2009), and Northwestern University (1998-2017). Gordon has been married to Melissa Weller Davis, a non-governmental organization expert, for nearly fifty years. They have three fabulous children, George, Charlie and Victoria. Gordon and Melissa now split their time between Evanston, Illinois, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Book preview

POET’S CHALLENGE

The challenge for the poet, or his fate,

Is to surrender to the undertow that

Draws him into deeper water

Where the formidable breaker

First auditions as a modest swell.

If at first unprepossessing,

It gathers strength and then, progressing

Lifts him up and lets him down

As, smitten by the nearness of the beach

It flexes, summons its reserves,

Gathers speed and energy,

And plunges dissolutely toward the sand.

It will have moved him only slightly

As it passes,

But he’ll have recognized its portent

And foreseen its rush

To dank perdition

Heralded by plumes of sputum

Spinning off its crest

As it collapses on the waiting shingle

That remains unmoved and unimpressed.

He will have heard the anguished roar as it expires,

Prostrated on the beach of dashed desires.

Now swim in through the foam and splatter

And immortalize the moment.

Scratch the record in the sand,

This exercise is for the poet’s benefit alone,

And if it quickly disappears unread, no matter.

The poet pens a natural history of the

Tribes of mutant thoughts that, seriatim,

Occupy and then, in turn, succumb, but leave no

Fossil record of their fleeting domination

Other than his imprecise transcription

Written for himself alone,

This terra is cognita to him only,

And is its own reward.

SPECTERS ON THE SHORE

Late morning and with nothing left to read,

Attention strays to lowering clouds

And drifting mist along the shore,

Its strands and tendrils braiding into dervishes

That swirl portentously

But lack a pattern or design

Until a rising offshore breeze

Persuades these brooding mystics to disperse

Revealing self-important herring gulls

That stride along the shore.

Could be a promenade of cassocked priests

Attended by a retinue

Of sandpipers like altar boys.

Mincing, chins tucked in,

As unmistakable as if

They brandished censers

And a brazen cross.

But to what end?

A paradigm of holiness?

Or nothing more than specters on the shore?

DISPUTES

Disputes logged to memory

Turn trivial in retrospect,

Neither raptures nor nightmares.

Silly litigations on behalf of clients now forgotten,

Controversies over noise in an apartment,

Banalities of a prior marriage,

Bickering directors on a bank board,

Confronting mental illness in a colleague,

Hardly worth the time it took to tell, much less to live.

And yet these tempests raged

And occupied all psychic space,

They surged and blew

And blocked the sun at noon.

They brought one to one’s knees.

One somehow felt one’s way,

Traversed those minefields, slogged through

The sucking mud,

Everything at risk, a high-stakes crap shoot.

Now the distant roll of surf

The light breeze off the ocean

And the gentle bending of the sea oats

Calls attention to the warming dunes.

EQUINOX

Beijing did not celebrate the equinox

Except for sprays