D. R. James

 
The Truest Thing
 
What if there were just one in each woman, each man? Many true (and untrue, which fact could be the truest), but only the one. And if it could testify? Not to land us in some trouble or to shame us or blame us into changing. Just to show us, anomalous honesty, what greatest truth resides within us, for better or worse, best, worst. Would the telling then become the truest—but then no longer in us, et cetera? Or would the telling, being telling, withhold more than it really told, with motive behind motive no telling could ever tell?

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Sentence
 
Sure my condition upon (recommendation so my existence isn’t brief and no longer privatized) proposes an opportunity (inspired both by fear and a firmer resolve not to over-focus on myself) not only to exemplify my survival to every middle-aged male of my heart-attack class but also to sink not into obsolescence like paper due to the computer following a situation not unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa’s coleopterous transformation (no doubt no thanks in part to that furnished apartment he imparted, which makes the family minus Gregor, who’s deflated, take a tram, their car full of sunshine, into the country to count their blessings and consider his sister’s own metamorphosis), but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

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Evolution
 
The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.  —Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
As the old century closed and I resigned myself to climb the acclivity of the new – like a muzhik forever fixed in his lower track, or how a withdrawn Australian cattle dog can still herd stock as apt and insistent as instinct – my conscription in this Argive-like quest continued: oracled, unquestioned, acyclic, amaranthine, no aah emanating from any tower of babble. Thus classified acclimatizer, fated never to upbraid my elders or disobey my betters, how, Waldo, will I ever become more conscious? As ungainly, as audacious, as an amateur, as dicey as a tyro? So awkward, awakened? So goddamned sapient?

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Epigraph
 
Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned
—Paul Valéry
 
So as I begin this one—vowing as an experiment not to give in to the vice of revision, that sumo of manipulation I so try to apply to my life— I wonder where I’ll leave it. Will it be in some sun-warmed clearing, a rocky outcropping in an old pine forest? And will I have set out this morning with getting there in mind? Or will it fall out of my pocket along a downtown sidewalk and blow a few feet until it lodges under a parked car, the puddle there and the dark intensifying the metaphor: a poem’s being abandoned? Thus bookended by country and city, both speculations in future tense, the claim neglects the unfolding—as if completion weren’t every word as it emerges, means and ends at once. The cone is not container of future tree. It is cone. Nor is an old cone empty.

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 Bad Mood in Holding Room 2
 
Despite intimidation it has its way. Still, from a closet with a one-way window, you scrutinize that self—helpless, though reluctant to crack the door, peel off into that space, fisticuff that thief into submission, some admission, since if you did, there’d always be a next you, back in the dark, seizing the emptied seat opposing the pane of introspection.

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At the Coffee Shop
 
Outside, a window washer watches me watching him, works his rhythm, window after window, simulating a seamlessness, tipping his squeegee after every-other downward stroke, coercing the water to run like blood from each overlapping pass, though of course he can’t touch my shining smudges, the smeared prints inside, five-eighths of a glinting inch away.

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Then
 
I was as bottled as limbless parents in an Irish ash bin. Beckett had
bidded it in ’56, but I didn’t git it till two kids, four kids, six bits, a holler from deep within my deepest of deeps, the shallow-valley shadows of my shrunken eyes, drunken with whys I wasn’t aware of. From above, hovering like a blackened, happy-faced, balloon-a-palooka, I saw the symptoms—my simpering, my sympathetic rhetoric—but no knowing, no being known, no being knew. No thing new! Then a glitch: I was thirteen-plus past a persistent seven-year itch. And rich that my dismissal, like a missile, was a launch not just a wash, let alone a squashing from the fling, the being flungness of it all. And the landing—Lord, the trashing, the dashing de-live-ring unto who knew whom? At least to myself. Almost myself. Almost yay. Yeah, yay!
 
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Notebook Flurries
 
It’s snowing sideways, flakes like atoms with no place to go, papery petals that parallel the gusty earth. Always the guest, I have always a question, a dream welling upside down from the veiled sheet of stars: it’s wild, I know, but the answer hasn’t been to praise it like you would a lean train of coyotes loping across the road, or daffodils if they could grow by moonlight, thumbing their frilly noses at the centuries of human sacrifice and bloody cargo, or stones cracking in the absence and failure of trees to fashion language from water and light. No, it’s the old song’s old story: the farmer in his field, the family at their morning table, the spider plucking her eight steps to the kill, wood, dirt, blanket, leaf, even thighs—even eyebrows over open lashes that fan the face that bars the door that says goodbye. Now only flecks that nevertheless fly like phrases, the snow joins the ground around the house, all the little letters piling like books, vowels like birdsong marking this digression into early spring.
 
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This poem first appeared in Dunes Review.

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Song of the Sirens of Life
 
The domestic smile of snow, the anonymous kindness of white, the imagination of the mouth, the grains of ebbing desire, those inaudible explosions, those nominal pleasures, the churches of the vapor—my tired mother finally flew; what she had chosen mimicked a parachute. Not a soul had bewitched her, but signaled safety, so sure.

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Easter Basket
 
The chalked branch bisecting the window plays temporary dead but supports the breezy life of early birds, who fly in, stilts first, like fuzzy kettles. I could look it up: Why eggs? I don’t need to know: Why not? The sun will shine or it won’t. In Michigan, gray and twenty-eight. In Daytona, eighty-two. Puny shoots here, fields of flowers, spring mice, or sun, sand, and breathy skin there. Cloudburst or late-winter stone. The garden awaits its orange day lilies, their uniform blooms, and ducks’ return to the complex’s phony pond is like friends dredging courtesy from their mouths back at work. Children will hunt outside, or in: Jesus, hardboiled and then deviled.

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This poem first appeared in Alexandria Quarterly.
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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, 2021).