May 6, 2023

James Davis May

NOSTOS

We had not quite been arguing
that night—but talking, discussing
how I answer any mood of yours
that falls below cheery contentment
with a litany of solutions,
as if trying to help you find
the right word for a crossword puzzle.
Sometimes the heart wants to be sad
and say so and be heard, you said,
or seemed to be saying,
as we followed our dogs out the door
into the yard, the carport light
startling awake at our presence
and then nodding off again.
You’ll remember that it was late,
our neighbors hours into sleep,
so we spoke softly even as we began
to really argue, this time
about who locked the door
on our way out. You’ll remember
that we gave up our prosecutions
when we realized one of us
had to hold the brittle ladder
while the other climbed to the window
we thought might be unlocked.
Part cat burglar, part narcissistic voyeur,
I paused after unfolding myself
into the room, observing
what we were when we weren’t there.
The television, mid-conversation,
prattling on without us; my beer still cold,
unmoved. You’ll remember
how the tails behind you wagged,
how happy we were to have back
what we had. I remember
I felt so heroic giving that to you
by just opening the door, which
I can tell you now, I’m certain I shut.

from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
Tribute to Love Poems

__________

James Davis May: “I’ve always liked Czeslaw Milosz’s claim that ‘the purpose of poetry is to remind us/ how difficult it is to remain just one person.’ I’ll modify that quote, though, slightly: The purpose of poetry is, sometimes, to remind us how difficult it is to be a person. That is, by testifying what it’s like to be a person, poetry defends (both justifies and protects) that flimsy—some say mythical—thing the self.”

Rattle Logo

December 20, 2022

James Davis May

SENTIMENTAL HOGWASH

A man who hasn’t thought seriously about killing himself
in over a year walks out of the living room
as the father in the movie stumbles toward the bridge
 
in order to jump from it. There are, after all,
things to do in the kitchen, pans to soak
and plates to rinse, and no one is watching him,
 
or the movie for that matter, his wife trudging
through a stack of student papers, his daughter
drawing dragons on a sketch pad, and the feeling
 
unfurling like a fever was so mild at first it seemed silly,
something that until then was dormant but now threatened
to make him cry, and though he isn’t afraid to cry
 
in front of his family, he didn’t want to this time
because they might worry, and then he would worry
that the depression was coming back again.
 
It’s snowing in the movie, the actor’s face obscured
by a five o’clock shadow and a sizzling agony
that’s surprising for a supposedly heartwarming film.
 
The lie is that seeing the world without you
will make enduring this world easier,
that you’re some sort of butterfly flapping its wings
 
birthing not a hurricane but a music that saves
everyone you love from ruin. The truth is
the world would be just as terrible without you
 
as it is with you in it, give or take a little pain
and pleasure. There’s nothing left to do
in the kitchen, so the man sits back down
 
and watches the father and the angel shivering
as they save each other in different ways,
and then the man’s wife looks at him and says,
 
“Thanks for coming back. We get lonely
when you leave,” and he apologizes and promises
to stay until the end, a scene that he knows
 
is sappy but loves anyway, even though
it will make him cry a little, just loudly enough
that he can’t pretend that no one notices him.
 

from Poets Respond
December 20, 2022

__________

James Davis May: “It’s the 75th anniversary of It’s a Wonderful Life‘s wider release. This year was my first time watching the film since recovering from a major depressive episode, and I was struck by how George Bailey’s near-suicide scene depicts despair.” (web)

Rattle Logo

September 2, 2020

James Davis May

WHICH DO YOU VALUE MORE?

I bought my daughter a Venus flytrap for five dollars
at the orchid nursery in Florida City, where the orchids
hang from the ceiling and crowd the shelves, striking 
as the paper lanterns that float like jellyfish in the skies of Chiang Mai. 
Reds and oranges, violets and pinks—extravagance 
is the word, as if nature, tired of the dreary camouflage it designed

for dust-grey mourning doves and brown toads, said, 
This next round is just for me. Some art is indulgent, 
and that’s why it’s good. Compared to those
pastel and neon flowers, the stunted flytrap looked as though
one of last year’s flowers died in a pot that hadn’t yet received
a new flower, so some strange grass with teeth took advantage of the vacancy 

and, unassumingly, set up shop. But it’s what she wanted,
and on the ride home she told me how Venus flytraps 
don’t just eat flies, they chomp down on raw hamburger, too!
That’s what the book she read and made her fall in love
with the plant before she ever saw one told her,
and I knew about the hamburger, though I didn’t tell her,

because when I was a boy, I read the same book 
and also convinced my parents to buy me a flytrap,
and I even successfully lobbied for the raw hamburger, 
which I took to my room and dropped into the dinosaur jaws
I didn’t know people thought it looked like labia, and watched 
as the burger fell out—it was like feeding a nearly invalid grandfather

who doesn’t want to eat, when really what I expected
was the velocity of an alligator’s ravenous snap.
Better to have the world disappoint her than her father,
I thought. And when we got her plant home and put it
on the table and picked out a little raw meat, I was surprised
that it did close, not as fast as a gator’s mouth, but fast,

automatically, sort of like the way her hand closed
around her mother’s right after birth, an instinctual grasping
that fascinates us because it seems like will, it seems like love,
and maybe it is, but it’s not conscious of itself. And who says
love has to be conscious of itself? Which do you value more:
planned gestures like roses and chocolate or visceral action, 

your lover shielding you with his or her body
when you both mistake the transformer blowing up
for a bomb—a move that says I’ll die for you, darling,
without even thinking about it? We hold onto what we love 
the way almost-falling people hold onto railings. 
I’ll take the grasping every time. It’s what my body meant 

when I held onto my wife as I cried and cried and didn’t know why—
well, I knew I was depressed, but the pain had no source. 
I felt like a poorly shot bear in those awful minutes after the bullet,
how it doesn’t know where the threat came from and thinks,
maybe, that the trees did it, or the ground, but it still looks
for something to hide from so that thing doesn’t continue to kill it. 

I held onto her and cried until we were kissing
and then making love. Did things get better after that?
A little, and then they got worse, and then better, and then worse, 
and then better, and then worse, but that’s life, right?
The point is that this time the plant took the food 
because sometimes the world doesn’t disappoint us.

from Rattle #68, Summer 2020

__________

James Davis May: “When I played hockey as a kid, my friends and I would sometimes announce that we were certain NHL greats before scrimmaging. ‘I’m Lemieux,’ someone would say, and someone would shout, ‘I call Robitaille,’ and another would shout, ‘Coffey!’ Of course, we knew we weren’t actually these players; the thinking was, I guess, that we were somehow calling on their spirits to help us. Then as we played, we would mimic those players, trying to shoot, stickhandle, and skate in their style. My theory is that poets do something similar, that almost every poem has a hero/heroine poet behind it, a Dante guiding us through the process. It’s pretty clear my hero for this poem is David Kirby, whose braided poems just stun me. Inevitably, when I finish a Kirby poem—a poem like, say, ‘More than This,’ which appeared in this magazine, I ask myself, ‘How does he do that?’ I explored that question by writing this poem, and it’s worth noting that after finishing the first draft I stood up and threw my back out.” (web)

Rattle Logo

April 10, 2020

James Davis May

RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

Even on the night my friend died 
    after a long illness— 
I won’t use the word 
      battle, 
    but the cancer was gone, 
and then it came back, like some slasher film killer— 

even on that night, the feral cat, the one 
that’s white and fluffy and sometimes affectionate, 
still crossed our driveway, quietly, 
from our neighbor’s pines to our rhododendrons, 

even on that night, she would look for some rodent 
or bird to terrorize and mangle 
and maybe fully kill. 

And I, drinking and grieving on our deck, 
was appalled by the world and its gross refusal 
to stop being the world, 
   and then embarrassed 
not just by my own naivety (though there’s plenty of that) 
but by my innate human sickness that believes 
we matter, 
      that someone is listening, 
that civility isn’t just something we imagined 
and don’t really follow anyway. 
That night 
I wanted everything to be better than it is, 

so I went to the fridge, got out the milk, 
poured it into a little bowl, which I left on the porch 
and found empty the next morning.

from Rattle #66, Winter 2019
Reader’s Choice Award Winner

__________

James Davis May: “Having had several friends die from cancer, I’m increasingly uneasy with the predominant metaphor we use to discuss disease, whether cancer or some other illness: that the experience is some sort of war between the patient and the diagnosis. In this poem, that unease mixes with both grief and existential angst to form something like a secular crisis of faith (faith in nature and faith in humanity), and I’m still not sure whether the gesture at the end, that bowl of milk, is a feeble or convincing answer to that crisis—maybe both …” (web)

Rattle Logo

November 26, 2015

James Davis May

AT THE ARTISTS’ COLONY

Look at yourself, Mr. Hands-in-Pockets,
married, early-thirties, mildly educated,
wearing the evening’s sole blue blazer,
watching the nude’s shadow pirouette
along the custard-colored curtain
and circle that other shadow,
a male’s, who strokes between his legs
the shaft of an exaggerated candle,
making the flame shiver on the wick.
You’re upset because you don’t get it.
Upset because it makes you uncomfortable
to not get it. Maybe that’s the point:
to feel uncomfortable, to feel
as though your little ordered world
is being laughed at. Derided. Or do you still think
that art is insight? That would explain
your version of humility: dispraise yourself
before anyone else can, the dinner host
who bemoans each delicious course
because it doesn’t taste as good
as he imagined. Ideals should be yearned for,
not reached. Isn’t that sports rhetoric,
that it counts to try and fail? Go Truth!
Clearly, the doormen at the last installment,
clad in all-black nylon body suits
and minotaur masks, were laughing
when they ushered you into the mini discotheque,
where under the epileptic light
they tried to dance with you
and, when you refused, your wife.
A small audience in the next room,
also laughing, watched through a webcam.
Derided, from the Middle French derider,
to ridicule, to laugh at unkindly. Your little world.
Don’t you like anything, your wife asks
outside in the courtyard. And you show her
the varnished antique bathtub
packed with soil and verdant with mint
and rosemary. She doesn’t say anything,
but that’s just the gallery’s herb garden.
People, believe it or not, actually live here.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

__________

James Davis May: “Not much to say about this poem other than that it is largely autobiographical and that my wife is long-suffering.” (web)

Rattle Logo

April 23, 2015

James Davis May

THE REALITY AUCTION

from a typo on a sign in Warne, North Carolina

It was a dour crowd that gathered at the auction house
beside the Community Center,
elderly, for the most part; the auctioneer, meanwhile,
sounded more like a Latin teacher
rehearsing declensions than a derby announcer
as he invited bidding on the first item,
Sparrow Consciousness, which drew only two offers,
though its description promised keen appreciation
for both the lexicon of gravel and the flavor
of windfall seeds on cold February mornings.

A couple—she wore flowers in her hair,
and a threadbare sundress; he, a greasy ponytail,
jeans, and a stain-spackled t-shirt—bid aggressively
on the blue pills of Altered States and went unchallenged.
The afternoon went on. Objective Reality
went for its asking price, not a penny more.
And when it came time to bid on the Ideal,
a burly man hauled in a miniature oak cask,
the contents of which, the auctioneer said,
should be self-evident, so it remained sealed.

The oldest couple there opened the bidding,
remembering their trip to San Francisco in 1948,
the loaf of sourdough they ate one night instead of dinner
(they could afford the travel but not their meals,
so they ate the bread slowly, tearing off pieces
which they fed to each other, leaning on the bakery’s wall
before returning to their motel and making love
as cold air scudded in from the bay and surrounded their bed).
They were outbid, though, by a farmer’s widow,
and she, in turn, was overcome by a mustachioed man

in a brown suit who appeared to have won
when the auctioneer, his voice excited by then
but quickening to a stop, opened a manila envelope
and, frowning, announced that the minimum bid
had not been reached, that they had to keep going
or the cask would be returned to the warehouse.
By then, everyone’s budget was stretched.
Their sole option was to pool their funds
and share the prize. Fist-thick rolls of twenties,
checks, and jewelry all filled the hat they passed.

When the price was reached and the barrel tapped,
they each tasted their thimble-sized share
of the sunset-red liquor, which was unlike anything
anyone had ever had and thus hard to remember
even seconds after—so they all stayed circling the empty cask,
sniffing their empty glasses, trying to describe what they knew
but couldn’t name. A few said it tasted bright, citrusy;
others thought bitter and ashy. “Brisk,” one said.
“Well worth it,” another added, and the rest stood there
in that sort of silence that sounds like agreement.

from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

James Davis May: “Warne, North Carolina, where I saw the sign mentioned in the epigraph for the poem, is about six miles from Young Harris, Georgia, where my wife, daughter, and I moved last year. Though we’re happy in Young Harris now, our move was a difficult one, as all moves are, and I remember questioning a lot of things, including, as the poem suggests, the nature of reality.” (web)

Rattle Logo