A Poem by D. R. James
"A Moment Depends Not Just on Its Moment"
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.
About the poet:
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. Having come late to poetry at 50, in the past 20 years he has published ten collections, the latest being Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press). https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
