Poems by D. James Smith

And You Will Wake

by D. James Smith

From Canary Summer 2022

Smith lives in the irrigated, semi-arid desert plain of California's central valley, spending a great deal of time in the nearby foothills and the Sierra.

Beyond the rotting fence
and the gate that leans,
banging in the wind

in fits and starts
like a sleepy drunk about to collapse,

beyond the wild mustard and the sunflowers
and the bulrush choking a little dogleg of a creek
you could find, if you looked,

the huge, black bees that drone there
like old Messerschmitts in sun-polished air.

There is something
just below the floating illusion
of cloud shadows wrinkling the pond’s face.

Yet when I watch a red-tailed hawk
oar slowly over the lake, brushing

the top of it, its talons half in the dark water, half
in the bright pennies spread over the surface,
it rises, passing over me, standing

on that shore, transfigured by its grace,
as it mounts with little pushups

its staircase of air, more specific
than any symbol,
greater than any dream.

Previously published in Poetry Canada Review.

© D. James Smith

Cattle

by D. James Smith

From Canary Summer 2020

Even in the blind, blonde days of youth
When I knew nothing of resignation,
Cattle gave me pause.
Into the poppies, fiddleheads and plush grasses,
They still pull me wondering what, if anything, flowers
In their brains. Without fences they will wander
As if they feel the gone buffalo’s migration.
The air flares warm around them.
They’re just standing, so calm that when the wind
Continues asking the grasses to bow, I feel
Something like grace. Mostly that’s in spring
When my car spins me down the ridge with a fine
Fume of rain come early as I take the long way home,
Thinking of things that should’ve worked out, things that might,
Beads of longing sliding quietly sideways before the wind
Plucks them from the edges of the windshield.
Sometimes on 41, speeding into evening,
I’ll see them, heads and forelegs picking up
As they hurry home in a gallows line over foothill paths,
Hoof-stamped with inkwells of dark,
Stopping some, then moving on past the hides of coyotes,
Flagging their warning from the fanged wire fence.
Come winter, sitting in my vestibule of silence, high
On the edge of the road, I’ll shut my engine off and crack
The windows just to feel the air ribbon sharply
In and out of my lungs. I’ll watch them, circled in groups,
Make a fence of their flanks to block
The wind that needles them, hear them moo
In the low wholesomeness of the psalms,
Or sad cellos, music I must have known once
Because it’s left a little hole in my side that then brims.
Brighter days, they move from place
To place, translating their pastures into themselves,
The sure machinery of their jaws
Sliding side to side, eyes half-lidded,
Minds blank as Bodhisattvas
Though not the same as they’ve nothing to divest.
Is it my steady and ordered life,
The certain itinerary of clocks,
That affords me this jumping off place?
Years ago, I watched some herded into a chute, restless
With what I was sure was an intimation of the end.
One tried to climb the rails that guided them, clattered
And thrashed, bellowing in a way that was mostly surprise
As it sensed that betrayal that will fall through
All of us one day, like this Judas sun
Now plunging through the stricken trees with a final,
Inevitable No, though it won’t be anything
We haven’t known in lessor fashion,
At the smaller stations of our passing.

© D. James Smith

First Rain

by D. James Smith

From Canary Fall 2020

Soft on the roof and I wakened remembering
The storm from some years back so strong it blew
Heads off trees, sent road signs spinning
Like scimitars, then the air falling suddenly slack
Then winding up again and the rain
Twisting in silk ropes from the eaves I stood under
Staring past them into sky, trying to find one line,
To follow its travel all the way down
Until my mind was falling, too,
As if tossed from a plane, no parachute, a man diminishing,
Stunned with the gravity of things.

It began with gentle though certain flecks on my face.
The first I welcomed, though withdrew my dawn cup
When the drops went from tentative to a fat plunking
Into my coffee. Midmorning I started backing away
From the glass, watching what I could on TV, sure, then,
Something was up. Come afternoon I was considering the chances
The weather would break the back of the bad years in the Sierra
Which had killed countless trees doomed by drought beetles
Whittling their multitudinous, deep-chambered tombs.
It wasn’t exactly Biblical, though the wind, insatiate,
Was full of stories, beginnings and endings,

Which have gone their own way for ages.
When the levees near Stockton gave way
Like the slump of old shoulders, water seeking the low
Places the highway was river, and the woman
With her two babies in car seats said she wouldn’t swim out
Without them, 911 recording the last of their high singing.
There’s a wild dignity in me that wants to sing, spurred
By the violence of things trying to become themselves enormously,
Metamorphous at a cost. The newscaster on air,
Helicoptering overhead actually suggested prayer

And, you know, I mean, no matter what I think of him
Christ’s lesson in fidelity was no easy feat. My own heart
Still weakens and skips its two-step too quickly
When I don’t know what it is trying to come through
Though I go on understanding it’s a kind of chanting that drops
This side of mortality which I feel like a boxer going down
Hard, braving closely examined failure.
The daily loneliness of rising again.

It was Channel 24 or my mind sending me pictures
Of the cold river caving in the doors of houses,
Walls leaning until they slid and lay all the way over
Slowly, the roofs like doffed hats sailing away on the water
So that my thoughts, disordered, for a moment,
Caught sight of the holy seal of one upstairs,
Emily Dickinson window, and my neck twitched
When that one dark starling I glimpsed
Catapulted into that glass.

The last night it slowed, and I, then fully awake,
Beginning and true, saw the night sky drawn
And quartered as it gave way so that
From its center stars stepped out carefully to quiver.
Glancing down I saw worms struggling out
Of the old, ill-fitting clothes of soil,
From the eaves came a dove’s, Oh, Oh,
Melting open a hole in the air,
And I entered.

© D. James Smith

For What It's Worth

by D. James Smith

From Canary Spring 2020

If I could I’d repeat, exactly,
What this bird, close by, whistles
Out of its private reason
I might know it and more
Of this night passing quickly.
Maybe this cricket
At the back of my throat
Wouldn’t scratch and falter.
Summer fires in the mountains
Wreath the valley like a great army encamped,
Stars picking up where those torches leave off.
Much needs burning off.
Little needs my prayer.
Nights like this, wandering
Out of the black thorns
Where my sleep tends to nest,
I see that I was blessed
To have begun early to refuse
The lie that you can’t find a way
To love your life, though everyday
It is required that I say all right
To my small allotments of sorrow.
Yes, I say, Lay your life down;
Right where you are will do fine.
Think with the urgency of forests on fire,
And a bird that listens
With intelligent silence
Before singing out.
And now, even this
Cricket beginning,
Strumming the little
Guitar of itself.

© D. James Smith

Nocturne

by D. James Smith

From Canary Fall 2021

After the cattle plod home in darkness,
and the stars wheel into place,

I pick my way down to study the river.
It’s low, just a murmur pouring

through roots of willows, rocks of granite.
Wind sends some pine needles sideways

and my eyes drift up and see light from the city
is a bridge spanning blackness.

I realize I’ve abandoned all plans to make a home here.
There’s no time for that. Regret, and a plan.

Riffles run the surface of the water like an unnamed desire
that fans up the neck, and I climb the ridge

to the truck and drive away slowly, thinking how
I’ve been looking, always reading, then, recently,

the doctor’s diagnosis making my mind suddenly
clear as water, like today when I came out of the trees

to find deer, feeding quietly along a stream.

Previously published in Cold Mt. Review

Touchstone

by D. James Smith

From Canary Fall 2022

Faint waves nose logs stranded along the shore.
I stop and toe the battered lips of a perch.
Wind picks at its translucent fins, the sky, close

with the tattered black of a coming front.
Off a small bluff a sandhill crane catapults, lifts
and swings around and works its way

along the ridge where maples flame and digger pines
stretch wide their rusted arms.
I come again to this boyhood place as the season

starts its great change, the hills
deepening with bloodied patience.
I don’t know what to ask. Another year

of the dark water that fills my sleep?
A dog barks somewhere in the trees, faint, persistent.
The lake twitches like a face as a frog

flays the surface, rippling out, phosphorescent.
And I think I am not my only father and mother
as I go each day from breath to breath

in need of a place like this, the charcoal
reeds, tipped with red, the light that fails softly
over a cove, these tribes of insects beginning to sing.

Previously published by Stephen F. Austin University Press

Yes

by D. James Smith

From Canary Summer 2020

I find myself saying, even to another rotted sleep,
And so see the morning’s light
Brimming in the blue bottles lining my window’s ledge.
And the Japanese maples beyond, those limbs
Sleeved in red fog and stilled
As if models for sketching elegance.
I don’t forget the deeply wrinkled
Trunk of the mulberry
Which I can finger whenever I want.
And so be it to the squirrels, obviously wired
To work cheerfully, today on a low limb, tails
Like women’s new scarves flung
Back and forth beneath shining, black eyes.
And what of their spinning
Leaf buds like soccer balls and their gnawing,
Nature’s furious urgency, how they cast themselves
With the recklessness of true confidence
Through thirty feet of bald air
Into the arms of another tree
The way I’d like to be throwing myself
From a long line with an end stop that’s
The right grappling hook for your heart
And landing, flashing my teeth, chattering
At that black cat who waits in the bushes.
Do something. A heart’s not for saving in a jar,
Says that certain anonymous voice.
You’re not on standby.
Let your letters burn.
In the end, it’s irrational, that is, love
Like I have now for the unidentifiable bird
That arrives at my olive tree every evening,
Able to fly straight up and down
Exhausting itself for, I don’t know, maybe gnats?
Or for what invisible what,
There in the moment
Dusk settles in? Sometimes, sudden,
Just the wind moving in the leaves
Makes me over into everything.

Previously published in Briar Cliff Review.