Personal Archeology
Imagine the graphable shifts
in your own self-civilization
from proud, young hunter
to calculating gatherer
to steady cultivator: industrious
over worker of your fragile
inner child. And notice
those thin but alarming layers
in your sedimentary record,
the relative moments indicating
odd breakthroughs, beneficial
mutations, weathered disasters—
in my case, that sudden thaw
of marital ice, the one that displaced
my psychic shoreline inland
hundreds of miles, submerging
remnants of a domestication
I’d survived in ignorant
and therefore precarious peace.
Any trained observer could write up
the reports, even poems
on the highlights. Why, I can recount
all kinds of particular days
like geological calamities:
when my grandfather died
and his wrist watch stopped
on the minute he hung his screaming arm
over the gunwale at the Red Umbrella Inn;
the first time I got drunk, so sick
on a buddy’s dad’s secreted liquor
I thought my life would spin forever
out of control; my wedding
when I served the wine, played crazy
blues harmonica and scatted us
on our merry married way;
the divorce.
So why, you may now want to know,
can’t I recall the eons in between,
those thick, bland strata,
those uniformly-striped piles of years
on years when nothing noteworthy
seems to have happened
but wherein must have developed
the insidious disintegrations,
and wherein I must have lived
over twenty thousand of my give-or-take
twenty thousand five hundred days?
Psychological Clock
As García Lorca may have written: some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
—Stephen Dunn, “Sixty”
The will between your ears—plus
when it cuts in, or not—can make
the tick followed by the tock
a pattern to soothe or drive you nuts.
It depends on your kind of quiet.
I’ll wait while you stop to listen . . . .
Now perhaps experiment: try tocking
the tick, ticking the tock, coercing
your orthodox clock to reverse itself.
You’ll find your mind can even tock
then tock, and that the tick, tick, tick
of your current, your always passing,
precious life can be less analytic. Me,
I’m finally grasping that concept called
the noumenal: Plato wisely warned
philosophy’s best kept till your thirties,
so these extra couple decades (or so)
have helped Kant’s metaphysics
make some inroads toward my a priori
formulations, those few brute givens
that lie behind my phenomenal world.
Not that I’ll ever make my sweet way
to where the meanings lie, but
at least I’ve seen it’s not too late
to loosen the noose around our
categorical necks and that the pre-
positions of our space-time grammars
needn’t wield such schoolmarm sway—
like the stranglehold that’s left red welts
around my pliant, compliant soul.
Look, our lucky brains will shuck some
million cells, including a few from troubled
routes through tired gates that may never
wend our way again. But there can be
rejuvenation, for I’ve caught a glimpse
that is both its outcome and its witness.
D. R. James, retired now 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 are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.
Sparks of Calliope 