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 are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his work appears internationally in a variety of journals and anthologies.
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

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,
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.

A Moment Depends Not Just on Its Moment

You’d like to move on beyond mean memory, 
skirt that peopled, hollow squalor, pack up
your numerous mind encampments whose smoky
cook fires now flicker, now flare on this or that
nostalgic hillside—sometimes like coded
reminders, sometimes like brash blazes arousing
anything but a simpering gratitude
for a brainscape stippled with so-called love.
But then a random moment’s rush of fragrant pine
rises also from vague beds of heady needles
in your rural past. And today’s savoring
of your young son’s self-liberation emerges
from its oblivious storage of forty years.
And the resuscitating pulse in a flagrant
poem owes its happy current to your
decades of emotional prohibition, your
suspension in the numb ice of wordlessness.
A generous peace depends on your history’s
sad and stingy drudgery, and a restful
season of seeing who you might really be
depends on the eons of not letting being
and on not knowing you hadn’t even seen.

Butterfly Solipsism

A butterfly’s flapping over Costa Rica,
it’s sometimes considered, could initiate
the chain that leads to tornados in Toledo,
hopping and ripping the heart
from every-other quotidian home.

Or maybe its deft stretch-and-glide
could instigate the violent Mississippi’s
surprising rise beyond its subtle, stolid realm—
the dainty queen behind that vast rebellion.

So I suppose I could blame this monarch
that reigns today’s thermals—that just
licked six purple puffs in beach grass
then juked my breezy mind—
for the nicknamed waves of catastrophe
soon to sweep a sleeping Gulf,
the nightly news even proving it
via weather patterns green-screened
before the stocks and sports.

But instead I’m turning my grateful face
toward the nor’easter just breaching
the stony coast of my brain: when it
rattles shutter to sash to rafter,
I’ll unlatch the deadbolts, throw open
the windows, and ready my heart’s
musty guest bedroom in welcome.