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.”
Night’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.
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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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