Gaining Purchase

By Patricia Makarewicz Davenport

In Gaining Purchase, the poems attempt to reflect on the everyday lives and experiences of women, men, and children; the beautiful, sensual, difficult, and harsh realities of life; and how we each learn from what we experience and, through our constant adjustment and balance, try to gain a solid foothold throughout our lives.

 

Based on her life experiences as a daughter, mother, partner, educator, and volunteer, with graduate degrees in Education and Counselling, Patricia Davenport draws on her life in New England and her Polish ancestry to paint poetic images. Her poetry reveals that while life oftenseems to be about striving to gain purchase and can be difficult and harsh, it is not always so. Life also has its times of joy, playfulness, sensuality, humor and achievement.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patricia M. Davenport
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223173687

Book preview

I

Voyeur

––––––––

Today I stop, to watch

my elderly neighbor

hang out his white socks.

He bites a wooden

clothespin between dry lips.

Sun moistens his bare chest.

He pulls each sock firmly,

trying to stretch it

back to full length.

He does not hear my sigh.

ANTECEDENT

––––––––

Through my open window

the silence

of snow.

Then,

a call for holding

across

the February morning.

Ganged male redwings

return to divide the marsh.

Flashes of scarlet

slash,

Blackwingfeathers  lifted in flight.

A cry

for awakening

to warmth,

the female

soon to return.

Firsts

––––––––

Yes, in ’65, we were in free fall.

Danang, our country’s first deployment.

Three thousand five hundred men,

the collective, yes, to a tribal call.

Undressing, we were shy

before our first tentative yes

of innocent consent.

Our youthful pause before

war, the draft, conflict.

We found a place to hide.

Listening to WNNI radio

I whispered, No news. No war,

turning the off switch

as city lights moved outside.

Listening to Etta James sing Loving Arms

––––––––

If only you could  see  me now.

No,

that is not my want.

Not see me

as present tense.

I mean

if

you

could have seen me then

as yes.

If only your,

"I see

You,

Love,"

were shouted

out across the fields.

If,

as I was just saying,

you could  have seen me

as you held me  laughing

almost  climbed inside me

with your monkey hugs,

that pressure felt even now.

I drive  drift  listen

to Etta sing Loving Arms

as I feel you again,    a monkey on my back,

and I want  to ask

did you see me

then?

Devil’s Wire

––––––––

"You go first.

I’ll hold up the wire.  Crawl under, careful,

now  you hold for me."

Once beyond the barbed wire fence,

we stand in autumn tall grass

looking off toward Camel’s Hump.

––––––––

The old red wool picnic blanket we spread

is tattered along its hand-sewn edges.

Local sheep’s wool, we always say: pride of ownership,

a keeper, ours now.

––––––––

Leaning back,

I study the scar where the

maple tree holds embedded barbed wire

half a foot deep.

Time measured by inches.

I think, how many years since someone stapled steel to her outer bark?

––––––––

The Devil’s rope  land ownership

fencing out and in

framing

Locke’s question:

Does anyone own land?

––––––––

Sharp wire strung to cut any animal attempting to pass through.

The  Stop  this is mine

of our civil society.

Off to my left the wind lifts a clump of deer fur hanging from the continued

fencing  movement once was stopped, but not for long, skin scabs over.

A Sunday Walk—Two Perspectives

––––––––

Suppose I found a tree