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 Id move away to the lake.
These computer keys are smooth and reflexive and move me into today.
Their dainty clicking prompts the flickering Ive 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 hes going to deserve.
Il va obtenir ce quil 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 hearts pounding
that wont 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
Pandoras box (which was actually
an urn, πίθος, I looked it up)
if itd 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, Ive asked)
but when its 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 Pandoras box
thats like the bag out of which
Im 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 Im left with an albeit manly box
that I probably should recycle. Or
its like having set out to see a certain big city
for the first timesay, Mumbai, a.k.a. Bombay
with the intention of having the experience
hit me like an aesthetic ton of bricks
(only Id 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 ninthgrade poetry portfolio,
something Mike Connors wouldnt have stood for
if hed 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 Im 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
its like accepting a challenge
to write my way out of a paper bag
only to discover its too dark inside,
and besides, it has a waxy finish,
so my pen wont 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
triptychd windows anchors me
into whatever the day has to say:
Dont go east, old man. Larry
was the saddest Stooge. Bread dough.
If I were you, Id buy high, sell low,
just for the rhyme. If only your father
could see you now, hed 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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