D.R. James

Bon Voyage!

Life is like stepping onto a boat which is
about to sail out to sea and sink.
—Shunryu Suzuki

Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself,
if at all, only at its end on the verge of death?
—Viktor Frankl

Does Soto Zen ever mention you can’t cancel,
can’t rebook for a better week, another season,
or due to limbo, your marriage gone to hell?
Life’s cruise is now and not never. Oh, sure,
you could leap, even double somersault over

the side, work your manic cannonball act,
that full-tuck drop from the poop deck.
Camus, for one, existentially questioned
why anyone wouldn’t have already executed
that particular kind of a final dive.

Perhaps he’d not considered the sinking. Or,
considered it and concluded, “Who can abide
that anticlimax?” But even he stayed
aboard, the festivities apparently far too
fetching: his father killed in the Marne,

his uncle paralyzed, his TB, the colonial thumb
pressing his Algerian brothers while Nazis
oppressed his entire world, his Nobel
that should have gone to Malraux—the wreck
at 46, his own too early disembarkation. No,

Camus knew what the roshi knows: this plague
of sinking, the bleak catalyst for the celebration
en route. Why else such great devotion,
Le Théâtre du Travail, two dozen volumes written
for la fraternité, and all before this middle age
at which I write? Older, he might have counseled

Viktor’s trick, too, like plugging your dear life
as an unfinished film: millions of tiny images,
stowing their successive meanings until
the credits roll, the low rows of deck lights
ignite, and you bow, the whole exposed cargo
only now rewound as your celluloid soul.

Psychological Clock

As García Lorca may have written: some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
—Stephen Dunn, “Sixty”

The will between your ears—plus
when it cuts in, or not—can make
the tick followed by the tock
a pattern to soothe or drive you nuts.
It depends on your kind of quiet.
I’ll wait while you stop to listen . . . .

Now perhaps experiment: try tocking
the tick, ticking the tock, coercing
your orthodox clock to reverse itself.
You’ll find your mind can even tock
then tock, and that the tick, tick, tick
of your current, your always passing,
precious life can be less analytic. Me,

I’m finally grasping that concept called
the noumenal: Plato wisely warned
philosophy’s best kept till your thirties,
so these extra couple decades (or so)
have helped Kant’s metaphysics
make some inroads toward my a priori
formulations, those few brute givens
that lie behind my phenomenal world.

Not that I’ll ever make my sweet way
to where the meanings lie, but
at least I’ve seen it’s not too late
to loosen the noose around our
categorical necks and that the pre-
positions of our space-time grammars
needn’t wield such schoolmarm sway—
like the stranglehold that’s left red welts
around my pliant, compliant soul.

Look, our lucky brains will shuck some
million cells, including a few from troubled
routes through tired gates that may never
wend our way again.  But there can be
rejuvenation, for I’ve caught a glimpse
that is both its outcome and its witness.

D. R. James (james at hope dot edu) is the author of the full-length poetry collections Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021), If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press 2017), and Since Everything Is All I've Got (March Street Press 2011); and seven poetry chapbooks, including Why War (Finishing Line Press, July 2014), Split-Level (Finishing Line Press 2017), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box 2019), and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press 2020). You can download and print his foldable micro-chapbook All Her Jazz at Origami Poems Project. Individual poems have appeared in a variety of print and online anthologies and journals.