Poems
by D.R.James

 

Mission Statement

 

The middle may make sense. It feels

like a blind man has corralled me

with his red-tipped cane. Bring it on,

he says, tough-guy seer! I stall,

now on beyond sixty years, fear nearing

a religion, its tenets far too tenable.

Inside the familiar pen, words cower,

denying the shortest line between two points:

I may be ravenous. I may be full.

The color I call red may be green.

What sort of jockeying employs such oblivion?

The shape I call round may be bird.

The shortest route between two stars,

my tongue, hovering in the familiar canal.

What sort of angel enjambs her eternity?

What sort of storm front will open my sky?

What landscape, what battle, what nudge, what hedge?

The song of the predictable sun says set, go.

 

 

 

 

 

At Sunrise

 

The cat at my elbow is like a rising - and falling - loaf of bread.

She will become cinnamon-raisin swirl.

Across the way, white shutters over dark red brick glow in the early light.

In long intervals, cars swoosh by through a sprinkling of spring.

This fine first cup of coffee is not bitter-sweet, just bitter.

It smells like the morning I knew I’d move away to the lake.

These computer keys are smooth and reflexive and move me into today.

Their dainty clicking prompts the flickering I’ve been seeking.

Another time it was Thoreau re-counting his beans from Walden Pond.

Meanwhile, the cat has become a multi-grain muffin,

her batter expanding over the paper cup, malignant

mushroom looming over a city soon to be our ally.

Though the friendly fire is frightening,

it will bring us the happy ending as always.

Happy is as happy does.

The pealing bell of freedom will deafen any outrage,

for we are as open as a Good-Friday tomb.

We will mend the crack and roll away the stone.

The prophet schlepping his satchel and silly redundancies

will forever find his satisfaction in cynicism,

his cynicism to be satisfactory, his satchel alone to be sacred.

No matter - in this he is going to get what he’s going to deserve.

Il va obtenir ce qu’il va mériter,

whether the cat tips her top or the shutters mutter a percussive tune.

Look: as the sun blooms, the bricks bleed.

 

 

 

 

 

This Day

 

This day has its shape

as does every day. It

arrived. You saw yourself

its backseat driver, the rider

useless or helpless, rude flurry

of persons floating the peripheries.

A blunt arrow of a day

with you glued to the shaft

a misaligned feather, more

a bag of drag than guidance.

No wonder the unrelenting

headwind, the heart’s pounding

that won’t die down,

this fatigue by dusk.

In the museum of days lived,

where consolations and regrets

echo off scuffed tile, off

cloudy glass, you fake it, fall

prey to what carries you.

 

 

 

 

 

Writing My Way Out of This Paper Bag

 

is a lot like unlocking

Pandora’s box (which was actually

an urn, πίθος, I looked it up)

if it’d been a shoe box, the hefty,

faux-hemp-textured kind with a hinged top

and rounded side flaps, pride-and-joy

of a junior packaging engineer (of which there

really are such positions, starting at $67K, I’ve asked)

but when it’s flung open, as if to allow

all hell to break loose, it reveals only

wads of beige tissue paper, an anti-

moisture packet shaped like a gauzy ravioli

without the sauce, and a glossy

brochure on pursuing life as an adventure,

(sporting their ‘gear,’ of course) that somebody

had to write and nobody ever reads,

but me.  This Pandora’s box

that’s like the bag out of which

I’m writing my way

just sits here like I left it

when I laced up the water-proof boots,

retro-fitted with my orthotics, and wore them

over sweat-wicking socks to the office

to grade papers and bitch about the dean.

And any diseases or plagues or other

acts of gods (unclear in the Greek, unlike

in the O. T., I checked),

whose disgorging from the horrid box

I might have artfully bemoaned,

simply fizzle,

just like this petty pitter-patter,

and I’m left with an albeit manly box

that I probably should recycle.  Or

 

it’s like having set out to see a certain big city

for the first time—say, Mumbai, a.k.a. Bombay—

with the intention of having the experience

hit me like an aesthetic ton of bricks

(only I’d come up with a better comparison),

  

but due to some predictable drizzle,

maybe a monsoon, or more likely

lack of funds (since I drop a dozen hundred

rupees every time I open my billfold)

and/or a fear of big cities (this one

in particular, it turns out),

I sit in my mid-price fourth-floor hotel room

in cargo shorts and a T-shirt that reads,

“What would Prufrock do?” and watch

a Mannix marathon with Marathi subtitles

because it reminds me of the guys in high school

and how Mrs. Wolf marked all the creative punctuation

wrong in my ninth–grade poetry portfolio,

something Mike Connors wouldn’t have stood for

if he’d ever written poetry.  Or

 

like when I have a breakthrough in analysis

after weeks of getting this latest therapist up to speed

and by the time I pull into the driveway

I forget the key phrase he gave me—

something about the pre-frontal capacity

for being of two minds.  Or

 

like in the dream where I’m trying to two-thumb a text

on an ancient flip-phone

to my twenty-four year old (only

when he was five) but multiple

in-comings from a life-insurance salesman

keep sending it to Drafts.  Or

 

it’s like accepting a challenge

to write my way out of a paper bag

only to discover it’s too dark inside,

and besides, it has a waxy finish,

so my pen won’t go.

 

 

 

 

 

Instead of Listening to NPR

 

Last night dipped into single digits,

slit sleeves of fresh snow clothing

branches immodestly, the lean lawn

bench again wearing its padded shoulders,

ethereal flakes making their no-sound,

hoping to prove Newton wrong. I need

nothing more to move me along.

The recliner aligned with the

triptych’d windows anchors me

into whatever the day has to say:

Don’t go east, old man. Larry

was the saddest Stooge. Bread dough.

If I were you, I’d buy high, sell low,

just for the rhyme. If only your father

could see you now, he’d roll over

in his urn. In just a minute

a cat or two, tails straight as neon

snow stakes, will discover my perch,

fluff me like their personal pillow,

settle in toward their own afternoon.

 

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