Runaway Odysseus:
Collected Poems, 2008-2012
James Welsh
Copyright 2015 by James Welsh
Other Titles by James Welsh
Pale Eyes, Fantasy
Those Years Without, Historical Fiction
Through the Woods of Babel, Historical Fiction
Tidal Swans, Romance
Where the Sugarcane Tastes Like Dirt, Adventure
Whiskey Romeo, Science-Fiction
Dedicated to the speech therapist who showed me that you can’t stutter when you write.
Individual Poems Published
Benediction for the Outside
New Plains Review (Fall 2011)
Calypso for Excuses
The Stray Branch (Spring/Summer 2013)
Colors (An Old Man to His Wife)
flashquake (Summer 2010)
Ghosts in Subway Windows
See Spot Run (February 2012)
how a speed bump destroyed the world
Caesura 29(2008- 2009)
I Am My Muse’s Right Hand
Grasslimb 8(2)
Penelope's Lament
The Centrifugal Eye (April 2011)
Tricycle Worlds
Kaleidoscope (July 2011)
Where Fireflies End, and Lightning Begins
Mused (2011)
6 AM
Silhouettes ripple in the webbed
mirror, against the ashgrey
sunshine leaking through the
window blinds.
It’s all a losing hand
tossing the dice.
My fingers are limp, but
I can feel the scars roadmapped
across these anemic arms.
Atlas has finally molded
the globe he could never shrug off.
Last night’s dreams glint
brokentoothed in my eyes –
flash like fool’s gold – flames
flickering, starving, wanting
to come in from the cold.
But it’s too early for stories –
it’s always too early for fables.
Besides, I folded up my biography
months ago, tired of reading
into my past like future.
I’m too quiet, afraid of rubbing
my past awake. I suddenly
feel that ridiculous urge to crackle
the glass in the mirror even more –
the crimson neons the first
coffee spoon that ladles out the afternoon.
November 16, 2010
A Century on the Mind
Have you already forgotten you
are the immigrant's son?
Have you already forgotten you
are the immigrant's daughter?
I guess a century’s long enough
to sift the dollar from the barter,
the begging from the supermarkets,
the starving from the artist.
Yes, centuries are long and memories
are the kids too short for the
carnival rides – but they’re
not that short that you would
forget you’re still the immigrants’
daughters and sons.
A Death of Cranes
If I could melt the mathematics
off my odometer with a lighter, I would.
But that would mean crawling
backwards to the beginnings of
my world, and why?
Just to watch this walnut of cancer
perched on the cliff of my lungs
shrivel down into a seed
instead of hatching like a popped balloon,
and an essay of bad words flapping
out of the nets of my mouth?
It’s too hard to be born again –
the birdwatcher says
it’s much easier to die instead.
August 17, 2012
A Goodbye Wave to a Hello Face
I do not know when the sun will rise,
will rise again, the night is dark,
a blackjack of spades spades
quick through the thick
dirt that curves and works
its way, lost, around my veins.
I do not know, I do not know
where the crow crows, but
I do know why – it has
cried too many times before
for a bluebird lover that
loves him nevermore.
Two deer gather at the
lake where the red clay
rises in groans like
worms at the gardener’s
hands. Two deer gathered,
not knowing why nor how
nor even when in the dark,
uncharted waters
sloshing at the trees –
none of those seem to
matter to two
lovers like these.
I do not know when
the sun will rise, will rise again
but until then, I intend to rinse
my face with the thin
harvest moon’s rays
that stray down into
this forgotten place.
A hallowed eve in
a hollowed-out place.
Well, at least none of that
is your goodbye wave
to my hello face.
A Moment’s Thought
“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”
–Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
“For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set…”
-Yeats, Adam’s Curse
The pinprick of this pencil opens
up my veins like a smile,
smearing the lambwhite
paper red like a lamb’s sacrifice.
My blood is already dry,
though, before it even splashes,
the drops black and crackled,
like midnight painted the house earlier
and now it’s morning, finally.
Still, I write on,
and I write more –
There’s the first bike standing upright, without a rider as a kickstand.
There’s the first tuxedo, filled out brimming like a balloon.
There’s the first book, pages turning, the wind literate and interested.
Perhaps it’s too easy to write off my
poetry as a ghost’s literature, even
if the page is inky and rubs off
on your palm – a page that’s
a sponge of some writer’s blood.
October 13, 2011
A Poor Man’s She
You’re a poor man’s she,
rising from the trash
drumming with tin cans
and crinkling in brown bags –
barely enough to warm a shaking
man drinking his whisky,
rubbing the bottle like a branch
to start wildfire in his hands –
“Prometheus I am” – yet still,
summer days leave him
to cold winter
nights.
The old life lingers deep
in his eyes. The rich man’s she,
the flickers of once-thick mattress
memories dancing in
circles – wearing their
best watches and purples – all
those waltzing tides, how they
wear feet like shoes (a laugh,
a smile digging up like a sole).
She was a rich man’s she,
the glee of a white wine’s
taste chasing away the names,
the faces, the days we all
want to forget.
Please come back
and have a drink with me.
A Time Capsule for Yourself
Sad man –
you’ve gone white in the cheeks –
Man on the Moon –
It looks like death
is beating its breast now,
worshipping
its frantic power (yet,
even with such ambitions,
the wind is the only
thing that speaks
death’s language).
You say you read tea leaves
easy enough, yet still you cannot
sleep, eat chocolate, play music or
urge gorgeous love to crush
the air out of your lungs.
Tell me why you’re sober
on living – the drink
has turned to water
in your palms, water
which you drink,
then swim in,
then sleep in and
drown, the sound
of smooth bubbles
too much for you to
handle.
The water’s gone now though –
now dance a thousand
flames on one waning
wax candle. The
weak purples that sag under
the storms of red and orange –
they’ve become the
whisper of grain breathing
in deep like a diamond
beneath the weight
of the summer sun –
no need to breathe out.
But even when juice runs,
your tongue still
feels numb to the touch.
Even when roses rust
the dry, iron fields,
for some odd reason
you can only smell blue.
I know you watch time,
waiting down the alarm
ringing, the sting of the
beeping waking you up
from your sleep, your
sleep of crude, mean
dreams free of the
she’s, the we’s (though
watching your watch
does boil the moment
into an enormous
eternity dancing
with itself, though
the band’s given up
and left hours ago).
But though I’ve been
writing years until my fingers
ached, rain-chanting
just a single drop
lost by a clumsy sky
full of bitter winters
and lazy shadows drifting by,
I’ve been dreaming the rough shape
of my goddess from clay –
still polishing the shine
in her evening gown –
I know a kiss on her lips
would stick like honey
and I know this will
happen soon, while all
you have left of love is
an old picture, the canvas
gray as the moon.
A Tumble and a Bluebird
Obscure is not a virtue.
It is the prelude to something greater –
my dancing blind on
the edge in the
hopes I fall down
so that as I
tumble around,
I can
spread my arms
like butter on
your morning
bread.
I grow feathers from the hairs on my
arms, I fly. Like leaves would, I imagine.
And until I hit the ground –
harder than a tired face
into a pillow – I’m both a tumble
and a bluebird, no obscure
tucked away forgotten in the
forest.
ABCs for Poetry
All Baudelaires carefully diary
everlasting freedom, grief,
hurt in joking, kangaroo language –
many need orthodox poetry
(quandary? rightfully so)
to understand vacant worlds,
xylophoning, yearning, & zodiacs.
Act Two
The cottage by the beach still stands inside
my mind, though, filled with giggles, laughter – all
of that still echoes (echoes) like the wind
that rattles a stick along the fence that guards
Old Wilson’s Cliffs, the cliffs a mile past
the cottage that my father built. But all
I see is nothing more than beaches, cliffs,
and some old grassy patch that stands in for
the home my father built so long ago.
A lonely grave for some old home in which
I, as a child, battled army men
against each other, helicopters all
a roar beneath the ceiling. Later on,
the army men became a book open
to Alexander Pope – and even now
his Chain of Being shows no sign of rust
although the poem’s even older than
myself (now that’s old). Looking down, I see
my feet have somehow buried deep into
the sand. I think of hourglasses. Why?
He could feel soggy moonlight
slur his sight, all while he swirled
the soupy night with his spoon finger.
He could telescope the mess of
stars that would linger and clump
together in the path behind his
outstretched finger.
After giving it some thought,
He called this the Milky Way.
He strummed the silky strings
strung tight across the guitar skies.
He decided to name the strings
after the sounds that they had made:
comets were now their maiden name.
And one time in the night,
He heard someone crying from up above.
He then felt tears splatter on him.
He called those tears the rain.
Against the Thick Wall of the Canvas
In this hard-spun era,
I puppet my reality
as I raise my fist
against it all –
although I know
each step is a hidden
fall. At least, so crowed
the crowd of crows in their
throaty drawl.
But although
I know all’s
vanquished, I’ll just
mix my own colors
and throw them against
the thick wall of the canvas.
Alarm Clock Squawk
Sometimes, I take my time with waking,
breaking dreams like streams that toss
and stretch around my feet – yet I always
step in the same freezing river twice
for some strange reason.
I will rise now, though,
and writhe like dandelions climbing
wind that winds them up like pocket watches
that always keep the time –
this is good night to the good nights
as I meet the dawn armed with a sword
that’s the spine of my pen, a sword that cuts
to the heart of the matter, a pen that
wires blood into the paper’s veins,
just to keep this dream alive.
I sing with angels in my dreams sometimes –
and other times they teach me,
reach out to me and pull me
through worlds, each
world a key shaped within a marble
that warbles
metallic
as it slips your fingers
and skips the floor.
Just give me three more minutes
to dream my literature and I promise you
I’ll give you something worth dreaming for.
And We Drown
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
-T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
It seems I grow older the more I think of it,
what with my knees gone to the dogs
or knowing the dawn’s not drawn
with watercolors that the frogs splash in
or where the whooping crane reels in its fill
of dinner. I know about orbits and rotations
and the gravity pressing down on my knees,
squeezing the air and truth out of me.
On my walks around campus, I roll my
ankles like some with their r’s, although
I know the sound of my ankles crackling
is not nearly as graceful.
The tasteful comfort
of the past strangles me like
a blanket and I let it, coughing on
the clinging dust rusting the fabric.
Yet despite the charm crowning at my
hair, the grey staring me down in the mirror,
I know that each step I think of is one
more to the door where you’re waiting
with arms folded and a
smile frozen on your face.
And so I work my way back home.
Apple Crumble
“It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”
-Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
Tonight, after we talk,
I think I’ll walk through this field
of lights I know of near my apartment,
where each of the bulbs burst like
stars across the galaxy, stars so distant,