'Brit Lit Weighs In' and 'Wedged, Continued', by D.R. James
Brit Lit Weighs In
(a cento)
Billows were breaking, sea against sand,
long before prime had rung from any bell—
and from a long way, hard and dangerous.
Yet little good hath got, and much lesse gayne
by spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.
Each flower had wept, and bowed toward the east,
time’s winged chariot hurrying near,
but when the assault was intended to the city,
(before polygamy was made a sin)
their fluid bodies half dissolved in the light.
Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair,
the applause of listening senates to command,
they reeled, they set, they crossed, they cleekit,
and then the perilous path was planted.
I rose and turned toward a group of trees
through caverns measureless to man,
which kept my optics free from all delusion,
now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
diffused unseen throughout eternal space.
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range,
and I, perchance, half felt a strange regret
of all the thousand nothings of the hour,
not knowing in any wise compassion,
all things counter, original, spare, strange.
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
the full round moon and the star-laden sky,
to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
tell me not here, it needs not saying.
This land, cut off, will not communicate:
spot the blown word, and on the seas I imagine,
in short, a past that no one now can share.
Sources: Beowulf, Chaucer, Everyman, Spenser, Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell, Milton, Dryden,
Pope, Johnson, Gray, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson,
Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Housman, Auden, Thomas, Larkin.
—first published in Unlost Journal
Wedged, Continued
Some days I even dare to face whether the (un)
(re)stored fortress of language that bears up my own
subtle house of doubts is surfacing or sinking and
whether my sentience is like a band of seekers crossing
then walking its idyllic beach, drawn by the free music
of wind and surf, or like exiles-like-mice left to roast
in its thick wilderness of land-locked dunes, the sky
scraping and thriving overhead, bordering on ash
no matter dawn or attitudinal dusk, no matter the cringe
of sun hung low, its scrimmed rise or fall. Other times,
the hours like shifting sands penetrating or escaping
a weathered perimeter flood with the cowed wonder
of what might lie beyond: dark cliffs, remnants eaten away
from a tilted world, mythic stones stood and held on edge,
a remote ocean boiling away its underwater flora and fauna.
Or just maybe mind’s way one day will move easily
like wheels over a hard but ebbing frost, eventually
barreling down the clean slopes with the look and smell
of lucidity borne of speed—but all caught still
in the taut ebullience of sapient insufficiency.
—first published in SurVision
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press 2021), and work appears internationally in many anthologies and journals.
View of Mount Holyoake, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm by Thomas Cole (1836)