Poetry: Selections From D.R. James

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Crater

 

A lank walker in a windbreaker

gripped his iPod like a

hand grenade, ear buds

tethering the deadly balloon

 

of his head as he sped

toward the park, past me parceled

and idling, peevish in my vehicle. He

boarded his bus, whose folding doors

 

opened slowly like a yawn hung

sideways, which I was feeling

in my van, in my gums, the FM

giddy and bummed announcing

 

we’d only finished half the job

in Afghanistan—the half that

necessitated the second half.

In those same ten years

 

my two middle-schoolers zoomed

from skate shoes and attitudes through

two huge universities, their growth charts

penciled on the doorframe as if

 

to bar-graph the body count,

and I wondered, who exactly nurtured

all those other pierceable sons

into the maw and paw

 

of roadside bombs? The red light

flicked to green and I thank-you-ma’am’d

through the mine field

of winter salt and tax cuts, bounced

 

through a big one, looked up just in time

to see the walker in a window

beam and take his seat, bend as if

to pray and pull his pin.

 

 

 

United Nations

 

The tragedy of profit is sexy,

the campus or supermarket a web

of tentacles. We endeavor to breathe, yes,

protest with an elbow here, fresh petals

or a nylon rope there, but our inheritance

is a fake. It might as well be a beggar

you discover playing cello with a hairbrush,

each movement mysterious but then again

predictable. Yesterday, in the divide

 

between our planet and our honeyed being

a chorus of insolent windows reflected

six shades of flags that only the valley

of the shadow of laughter would engender.

The noise came alive with the spirit of labor,

but it too was just another gesture, another page

poised on the cliffs of state. Better, practiced

scavenging. Better, craning your zippered neck.

Better, squeezing sunlight for a drink or burn.

 

 

 

He Courted Their Judgments in His Prison

 

The mail delivered them to his cell.

Censored, he slit them and listened.

He dreamt in columns, dressed right and left.

He cared and cared not about the king:

crazy was what crazy did. He was

 

of two minds, both of clawed block.

The high windows admitted—was it light?

Thus waxing and waning became his rhythm.

Tuesdays goulash, Wednesdays mac-and-cheese.

His own warden, he was lenient, he was humane.

 

He awarded gold stars, excursions to the mall.

He was convinced of his own innocence.

He resided in the confines of a cultivated guilt.

And it wasn’t such a bad existence. His pay rate

reminded him of his mother patting his head.

 

Dogs howling nearby reminded him of his dog.

Nights, denial made for a straight eight hours.

He wasn’t above apology or the completion of chores.

By the time something had to happen, something did.

He snored, but who didn’t? He rolled over.

 

 

 

Sunset Stripped

 

An orange sun descends like a slow-mo yo-yo

toward where this Great Lake’s turned purple.

I’d wanted it to sing back-up to a love song

but as it dripped from its last slip of cloud

like a tear from a bloody lid I knew

meager romance was doomed. Nature,

her two-faced refrain—one moment

a hawk, of all things, startles, wings

across your wondrous path and the next

you’re can-canning around the carcass

she was deconstructing. And as wave after

unwavering wave unwinds its white loop

of soothe the grinding motion’s undermining

the stilts you snooze on. Snide circle of life,

something about the conservation of all energy

that enervates the grand delusion. Just as well:

reality’s better, if bitter. Buttering you up

with how no two sunsets… just leaves you

greasy. It’s data: the more molecules, the more

oranges, yellows, and reds. Especially the reds—

their longest wavelengths, their blossoms

like gruesome wounds, their crimson dreams

aboard the steady surf that sings me to sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).