Late Summer Ode

Dude, it is so done. Though Summer went on and on.
Now the shadows lengthen, now the wind spins. Gone.

Olena Kalytiak Davis’s Late Summer Ode presents a wild and aching poetry of literal and metaphorical “late summer.” Davis is by turns funny, self-indicting, and self-mythologizing, as in “After Chekhov,” where “olena romanovna wept in earnest”:

she wept mostly for herself
her already long life with all its painful and fruitless days

but also a little for her daughter

she did not weep for you

Davis describes a life in Anchorage, Alaska, as the mother of two grown children, who spends time reading widely, visiting friends in New York, getting high, and passionately elegizing passion, remembering “all those summers i courted you // in tank tops and bikinis (in clogs!),” yet insisting: “but I do not like you either // do not run thru me / do! / not!” The poem “After Rilke” begins with the swervy epigraph above and ends in this dire autumnal rhyme:

Stay up read late rove stoned
through the now, the fast
raving leaves. Unraveling, last,
alone.

Davis’s telling of “the now,” though lonely, is replete with irreverent awe, wonder at words, at the sweep of a life, at the sky (both “sky-blue-prison” and “prism of spin-back-earth”). She careens through registers, from high, declamatory lines, invoking Dickinson:

no longer ask what my verse can bring me
just diligent scan what late was scanted
record record of blank identity
the certain light now serious slanted

or evoking Millay (a sonnet’s final couplet: “bother not with your etiology / it’s metaphysics not biology”), to the slangy and low (as in these trochees: “noli me tangere you motherfuckers”). She rhymes and puns and trips in and out of iambic meter, making it look easy. 

Finally, Davis writes motherhood so well, from the daily grind—“who took my headphones my one working pair / snagged now likely snarled in your tangled teen / age shit […]”—to the surprising moments of redemption:

beauty brought not what beauty thought i’d bring
i styled not One but Two enduring things