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 an 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 an old house,
where it waits, to spark, to catch, its insulated
nest invaded 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.
Another Time, This Same Moon
Another time, this same moon,
which free-hands its flat arc across
a fathomless slate of nighttime sky,
supplied so much duplicitous reason
that the warmest stretch ever of
endless kissing seemed also to signal
an endless love. Have others believed
in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire
and the jazz and the lips touching
just right? The palm of conversation
folding in whatever tender confidence
came to mind? No way, back then,
could that peaceful walk at dusk—
the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink
over a tiny inland lake—have led
to the sorry war to come, the saddest
set of regrets that still colors
my occasional wandering. How could
once watching waves etching a shore
have also meant the meanest goodbye
would eventually roll its own way in?
How could catching together
the brilliance of high light glancing
among bright white slopes have groomed
a final run so treacherous, so doomed? How
did such intimacy simply disappear
by the end of my life’s finest week?
Do you remember yours—remember
right now—this loveliness before rejection
recklessly re-bursts your re-built heart?
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). https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
Image: Gerda Arendt, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
