Butterfly Solipsism Since Everything Is All I’ve Got

Butterfly Solipsism

D.R. JAMES

A butterfly’s flapping over Costa Rica, it’s sometimes hypothesized,

can initiate the chain that leads to tornados in Toledo, hopping and ripping the heart

from every-other quotidian home. Or maybe its deft stretch-and-glide

might instigate a violent Mississippi’s surprising rise beyond its otherwise

stolid realm—the dainty queen behind that vast rebellion.

So I suppose I could blame this monarch that reigns today’s thermals,

that just licked six purple puffs in beach grass then juked my breezy mind,

for the nicknamed waves of catastrophe predicted to sweep the sleeping Gulf,

the nightly news even proving it via weather patterns green-screened

before the stocks and sports. Instead I’m turning a grateful face

toward the nor’easter breaching the stony coast of my brain:

when it rattles shutters to sash to rafters I’ll be

unlatching the deadbolts, throwing open the windows,

readying the musty guest bedroom of my heart in welcome.

—First published in A Little Instability without Bird (Finishing Line Press, 2006)

Since Everything Is All I’ve Got

D.R. JAMES

Eighty-eight degree cicadas. A cat who knows to wash with those luffas we call paws. This morning’s lacy light, which also moves the leaves. Squirrels, not a slow-twitch muscle in the lot. Cilantro, basil, parsley in little painted pots. Clock with its tick-it, tick-it, like a rhythm, like a tiny cycle. The safest story behind whatever, like the whether this or that: Garage door? Sycamore? Extension cord? No, only a chair on its own, cobweb in its corner. Yes, just so: a pure urgency for more silence, less chance to become unlucky. Grass, branch, dismantled fence, emblems all, for sewing on the sleeve between one’s lumbering sorrows and one’s existentialities. The local birds anxious and aboard their feathers. Herons, somewhere, hungry in those shallows, working hinges we call elbows. Needles, maples, manic ant hills, the clouds I’ve noticed, the clouds I’ve let get away. Gray but expanded asphalt, dark black in the cracks and crescendos of kids skidding, the littlest always last, the largest largely never. Heart forever conscientious, so clever under cover. Mother twitching while also shrinking. Wall and popping nozzles during early morning sprinkling. Lists of lists, reminders to remind. Beach at the end of every westward road. Stairwell, bike rack, barbecue utensils. Tail on the string on the bamboo chimes, waving in what we will call the wind, which simply isn’t visible but stirs its island song out over lawn, curb, manhole cover, over everything, which is all I’ve got.

—First published in Since Everything Is All I’ve Got (March Street Press, 2011)

Atop Mt. Harvard, May 1976, with a line from Major Jackson

D.R. JAMES

You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter. —Henry David Thoreau

The summit staged a glimpse. The West became a canvas. When I’m dispersed, it draws back. That chalked terrain: peaks pleated, engraved, cockedpinched infinity, fabric embroidered with the white flares of lingering snowpack. I thought, how else might I conjure heaven? My mind’s museumed, hammered facts, haloed proofs, disturbed forever. Imagine them clenching fists at infringement. They’d had god’s licensed niche: the jig was all but up.

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, MI. Poems and prose have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals (including New Reader Magazine #7), his new chapbook, Flip Requiem, releases in Spring 2020 (Dos Madres). https://www. amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage