Davis McCombs teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas. His first book, Ultima Thule, was chosen by W. S. Merwin as the winner of the 1999 Yale Series of Younger Poets. He attended Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and Stanford University as Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996, The Missouri Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review. His new book, Dismal Rock, was just chosen by Linda Gregerson as the winner of the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press in Vermont and will be published in Fall 07.
Broken Country
Some nights I drive the backroads out across
the county, its knobs and barrens spreading
I'd forgotten how, each August, the fields rise up
at every turn like walls in the headlights,
how so much of the world lies out of reach.
Now only the wind can comb its knitted stalks,
only the bats that beat across a fence of light
can thread its ductwork--as we did, that once,
standing shoulder to shoulder in the glint
of New Discovery; we were intruders there
inside that lost cave passage, turning at last
to face the long walk back, to let our thick lives
come between us and that thin, lightless place.