Tag: D. R. James

Two Poems by D. R. James

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

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.

Two Poems by D. R. James

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Man to Man with the Folks’ New Condo

I’m glad we have this chance to chat, now,
before my parents move in
for the rest of their lives.
There are things you need to know.

Frankly, they may not be easy
to get along with. Toast, for example,
the making of it, you see, for some reason
very important—how brown, how hot,
just when.
Essential things like that.

Remembering past trips, too,
can be irritating,
the details—which hotel,
in Warsaw, for God’s sake,
where they first heard my sister
would divorce her first husband,
and just where that great Dutch
cheese place was, there,
in the mauve photo album,
a few pages after me in a tux,
the wedding.

They will tell you how they miss
all those rooms
in the house where they lived
for forty years this Wednesday,
coincidentally, my mother’s
eighty-first birthday.

And whenever your ‘foreign’ gardeners
mow and trim the prim edges
of this emerald lawn
my parents will tell you how they dream
about their yard—all that grass,
the matured maples, the hedge of lilacs
defining the lot line out back.

You also need to know that you
were not their first choice.
They wanted the model
with the sunroom like their porch, to be
closer to the clubhouse, the workshop.
But they were told that could take
another couple of years,
maybe three or four or more,
and, as Mom puts it,
at this point they can’t gamble,
what with Dad likely going
totally blind at any time,
and her just not able
to be their eyes and legs, both,
here, in a whole new place.

“Man to Man with the Folks’ New Condo” first appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal.


For Therapy, I Mix Metaphors

From a frozen wedge of machine-split pine,
tossed on this settling fire, one frayed, martyred
fiber curls back and away like a wire, then
flares, a flame racing the length of a fuse.
Imagine this my innermost strand, a barely-dirt
two-track off Frost’s road less traveled, a thin,
trembling thread of desire, the uncharted blue vein
of a tundral highway. Or in some dread cloister
it dreams, and a sillier spirit suddenly moves—
like four fresh fingers over flamenco frets,
like dumb elegance uttering Old Florentine,
never meaning one of its crooning words.
It might dance—Tejano, Zydeco, any twenty
Liebeslieder Waltzes, any juking jumble
of a barrel-house blues—wherever arose
an arousing tune, the thrum of a Kenyan’s
drumming, the merest notion of Motown soul.
I do know: there must be this lost but lively cord,
an original nerve, perhaps abandoned, or jammed
as if into an airless cavity of my old house.
It waits, to spark, to catch, its insulated nest
punctured by the stray tip of a driven nail.
It craves some risky remodeling, that annoying
era of air compressor, plaster grit, dumpster,
and the exuberant exhalation of ancient dust.

“For Therapy, I Mix Metaphors” originally appeared in Lost Enough.




D. R. James, a year+ into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, and cycles 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.

Two Poems by D. R. James

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Flip Requiem

Only black-and-tan clumps
cling anymore to our oaks
(raking finally making sense),

which stand silent as pickets
this side of winter’s no-longer
fierce or precise approach.

I’m over a father’s death,
an angry mother’s post-mortem
reach (though there it is again),

the delusion that autumn’s demise
warns us of anything. Those fears?
Fading—their threatening hues

mere harmless colors after all.
Instead, a dogwood’s scrawny pecs
spread stripped limbs to greet us

into the new season’s breach,
a wind-scrambled blueprint of
tangled twigs, leaf eddies, and rain.

What’s to come used to command
such aching concentration, demands
collected in the heart. Now, subdued,

it signals no sad story tracking itself
across some dismal arena dressed in
black, elegiac notes—but noodles muted

scales that free the blood and coast us
toward a more cordial space: a flip
requiem, perhaps, for chronic requiems.


Second day of gun season,

and they’ve already bagged
some ninety-odd bucks.
A fine-looking local,
camo hat jaunty
over jostled blond hair,
bolt-action Winchester babied
between olive-green sleeves,
poses on the front page—
got a ten-pointer (if I know
how to count it right). Me,
I’ve just posted warnings,
cancelled all maneuvers,
withheld all furloughs,
mandated all my dears
close ranks at home base
for the duration.

“Flip Requiem” and “Second day of gun season,” were first published in The 3288 Review.




D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020); his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project; and individual poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. You can find his collections on Amazon.com.

“On Not Being in Bangladesh” by D. R. James

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment
“I like writing about where I am.” —Billy Collins

I like writing about where I’m not, such as
my colleague’s cottage standing empty along a pebbly shore,
its insides—yes, knotty-pined, patina’d, I’m pretty sure—
enjoying the respite between peopled summer weekends
or the cushioned silence of winter’s drifts and desolation.

Indeed, for me a good vacation wouldn’t be complete
without the writing of a poem made possible
by the time I might otherwise have spent
cycling through Belarus or Montenegro
or perhaps observing profoundly to my spouse, once more,

and to everyone gathered at some seaside cheese market,
that the tiny countries of Europe are to U.S. states
what Cornish hens are to cuts of beef—
just me if I were doing my part
in re-embedding the ugly American.

It is also a lot of fun simply imagining
that advertised walking tour of Patagonia,
whose vast, steppe-like plains,
according to one encyclopedia,
since I wouldn’t know from experience,

terrace west toward the Andes,
their barren shingle slowly giving way
to porphyry and basalt (types of lava, FYI)
and an increase in annual rain and vegetation.
And since I’ve been told I should get away more,

especially now with the recent re-inflation
of a few of my coronary arteries,
here I don’t go to Slovenia, Guyana, Burkina Faso,
to Trinidad and Tobago, Tanzania,
to the Pacific islands once crushed by Portugal,

to all the homes of the Uralic family of languages—
Hungary, Finland, Estonia, places like that—
to Warsaw, again, thirty-five years later,
to Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur in Reykjavík
for a hotdog smothered in remolaði.

But what I’m really hoping is that the Dalai Lama
will join me when I head for the Tibet that lies
just beyond the plateau of my porch,
which we’d pack up into on the bony back
of a ballpoint pen, with him highlighting old hangouts

among the rugged heights,
me taking copious notes on the fly,
though that of course wouldn’t mean we’d be any closer
to peace in the world or the end of exile
from all the places where I’m not.

—first published in Sycamore Review




D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020); his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project; and individual poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. You can find his collections on Amazon.com.

“Epigraph” by D. R. James

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee
2021 Best of the Net Nominee

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
earlier this morning with getting there in mind?
Maybe it will 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 comes out,
means and ends at once.

The cone is not container
of future tree. It is cone.
Nor is an old cone empty.




D. R. James’s latest of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project. He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan.

 https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage