Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back poet D.R. James of Michigan with two mesmerizing poems about being who we are, finding and healing (two meanings of recovery) our most authentic selves. In “Today’s Jay Imagines Herself a Hummingbird,” a resplendent blue jay decides to patronize the humming bird feeder, prompting D.R. to ask “why not?”. This leads to a meditation on identity that turns upon the unexpected: “a worker, churning dough,/ re-discovers one morning he’s an artist/, best home sculpting fragrant stacks/ of unsolved wood. And a girlfriend,/ no longer satisfied to abide/ the swollen lines of lying men, decides/ it’s time for that whim she’s always had/ to dance. And a wife, or a husband,/ whose body’s meant for loving differently,/ confronts the facts, a staggering move,/ and gradually life renews, re-begins/ in the tough time it takes not to go back.” In a time when our society, at least our government, appears to be going back to restrictive and oppressive ways of living, these affirmations of individuation are vital. D.R.’s use of assonance and internal rhyme complement his jazz and dance imagery.
Musical imagery continues in “For Therapy I Mix Metaphors,” another meditative flight. We begin staring into a fire as a fiber of wood curls away and burns. D.R. finds kinship with that fiber: “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.” His imagery is wild and erratic, ranging from cold to hot: “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.” This mercurial language is apt to describe that mysterious inner self that surprises us as we age and find ourselves in new situations. Alliterative music, sibilants and assonance pop and crackle throughout.
Read D.R.’s illuminating poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
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. He divides his time between staring into the woods from a leather recliner and staring into the woods from a deck chair. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021).