THINGS AND SOULS
Can things have souls? This house, for instance.
I don’t mean the ghosts
of who was born here, lived here, died here,
but the windows, ceilings, walls,
floors, and newel posts.
Or the chair I’m sitting in.
Carved by Grandpa’s dad.
My head rests on a cherub’s visage.
When I doze I hear his voice
and don’t feel half as bad.
My recipe cards, scrawled with love,
fill a metal box.
All different colored penmanships.
Savory as a century.
Every decade talks.
And you, now, listen, read, or look, or
all three, as if I
were in the words, the sounds, the page,
and you knew who I am or was,
which you will, by and by.
THE WHAT AND WHEN OF IT
It
is when you want to die, or are about
to want, for want of what you can’t quite say.
But you don’t die. You pause. Which is the point,
the point of the pause, the what and when of It
It
is a lighter that somebody—the Someone, say—
has lit, and you do not have a cigar,
much less a cigarette, not that you smoke.
You never did. But O to light up now,
or after the deed, if only you could do.
That lighter, like a trick candle or match,
can’t be blown out. The when and what of It
It
is what you don’t know, but have to find out
about, in order to inform the world
with cries and hues, or nuanced whisperings
that, if you’re very lucky, will succeed
in deluding you, if only for a while,
with pearly grand pretensions to the Poignant,
the Beautiful, the Worthwhile, or, if not
unqualified success, the Memorable
It then makes you try, but also hone your stone
of honesty so you take a true look
at what you’ve tried and done, and you admit
to yourself that you can’t, adequately.
And won’t. Ever. But not for want of trying.
So you keep trying. And dying, not dying,
an honest hour, a dedicated day,
a desultory decade at a time,
a life unliberated, but well lived
It is when you boil and bleed and burn—with joy,
and from the deepest, darkest, oldest, newest,
hottest, coolest part of you, or who
you are now, not the you you were before,
and surprisingly, even morbidly,
you much prefer the gore, the guts, the fire,
and to leave shiny crimson puddles everywhere
than whatever The You Before wanted to leave
It is when you feel pregnant, and you’re a guy.
In effect, with the fullness you feel like a freak
until you’re in labor and pregnant again,
then both at once, ad infinitum.
That’s what. That’s when
It’s when you do not belong to yourself,
and realize you never did, that that’s
the nature of the world, that is, true nature,
it’s always been. It’s that you never knew
It’s when you feel with your eyes, see with your ears,
hear with your tongue, et cetera,
with all the vices versa included:
that the world is a charmed forest, so that
even long years and time zones away,
the forest long burnt down to ash and dirt,
it tickles, every now and then, your nose
and makes your nostrils flare when the slightest breeze,
accurately cocked and aimed, restores
in a trice its imperturbable perfume,
all the wild foliage and florescence
you’ve ever known, and your sigh makes you smile
with the real-or-imagined aroma of honeysuckle
after a rain, or maybe just before,
so you rummage quick the depths of your pockets,
grateful even for all that you have lost,
or are about to lose, or even that you’re lost,
invoking the Muse and praying to God—dear God—
that today you took pen and paper to the park
THE VALUE OF TURMOIL
You’ve learned to listen to your inner angel.
Your curse is that you’ll always want to help.
Another curse is who has learned to shout
continually to drown the angel out:
The inner devil? Sometimes. But sometimes
it’s just diplomacy. Or common sense.
Or wisdom: having learned not everyone
likes light, or truth, or probing, helpful fun.
Perhaps this has a bit to do with why
Socrates spoke in questions, Jesus preached
in parables, Lao-Tse in cryptic verse:
none of them wrote. They talked. Moses’s stone
tablets, sheltered in The Ark, were soon shattered.
The inner voices punch and roll and flip
and tumble round each other. Now and then
a quip lands home, and someone laughs who just
might see, or has just seen. Decades later,
you get a phone call from a stranger who
married the one to whom, in ’87,
you said a thing that did strike home. She then
left her home town, moved to the other coast,
and met this man, this strange voice on the phone,
told him the story of what you once said
and the name of the one who said it—you.
He came across it on the internet,
tracked down your phone number and dialed it
and, after confirming that you’re the guy
who directed such-and-such production at
so-and-so theater, reminds you what
you said way back when to your ASM
(assistant stage manager) whom you don’t
remember. Still, he thanks you: for his wife,
their two children—soon three—and his life.
On other occasions I have not been
quite so successful. One can’t always win.
Have two black eyes and, once, a broken nose
been worth it? I suspect God only knows.
THE MAGIC OF WORK
To start with nothing and end up with something
is one end of art—not only the art
of galleries, museums, and so forth,
but possibly the art of living, too.
Math fails at this. There’s nothing you can do
to Zero—add, subtract, or multiply—
to make One. (Its reciprocal may be
infinity, but only by convention.)
To start with something negative and get
to something positive may be the end
of life as well as literature. I think
of orphans Huck Finn, Jane Eyre, Oliver…
The day Huck chose to save Jim’s liberty
and life—and be damned for it—might just be
the day a nation was born, or reborn.
Fiction, I’ve learned, can be more true than fact,
like Myth, which resonates as Metaphor.
In math, Minus One Squared gets you to One.
To start with the imaginary and
get something real, well, that’s the province of
invention. Also poetry. And love,
now that I think of it. Da Vinci’s dreams
took centuries, but Thomas Edison’s,
the Wright brothers, and thousands of others
came true, it seems, in no time. And should I,
in any line of verse—blank verse, like this—
remind you of the smell of fresh-baked bread
or cookies (chocolate chip!) straight from the oven,
or mention the first strain of Rhapsody
in Blue, or any favorite tune of yours,
do you not salivate a little, or
fall victim to an ear worm for a day?
In math, the square root of negative one
is i. I for imaginary. Squared,
though, you get Minus One. Square it again
and you get One! This won’t make you a god,
but sometimes when I enter the domains
of Fiction, Poetry, Imagination,
Love, Math, Art—Life itself—I catch a glimpse,
or dream I do, of how a God might work.
James B. Nicola’s latest of eight full-length poetry collections are Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense,Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. A Yale graduate and returning contributor, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice magazine award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels both stunned and grateful.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 