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.