Thomas James, USA (1946-1974)

Thomas James werd op 2 juni 1946 te Joilet geboren als Thomas Edward Bojarski.

Zijn gedichten verschenen regelmatig in verschillende tijdschriften en bloemlezingen zoals North American Review, Poetry & Poetry Northwest, die hem in 1969 de Theodor Roethke Prize toekende.

In 1972 verloor hij binnen tien dagen tijd zijn beide ouders. Gebeurtenissen die hij nooit echt heeft weten te verwerken.

Op 7 januari 1974 schoot hij zichzelf met een pistool door het hoofd (al is de familie daar nog steeds niet van overtuigd) Hij was 27 & had zojuist zijn eerste bundel "Letters to a stranger" gepubliceerd. De lovende reacties waar hij zo op gehoopt had bleven uit, er verscheen sowieso maar één recensie waarin hij ook nog eens werd afgeschilderd als een bleek aftreksel van Sylvia Plath. Een dichteres die hij enorm bewonderde, vooral haar bundel "Ariel", en waaraan hij in zijn werk ook geregeld refereerde. Net als Plath schreef hij vanuit een psychische noodzaak, met een sterke autobiografische lading, al wordt die bij James een stuk mysterieuzer en abstracter vormgegeven.

Andere dichters waar hij naast Plath veel affiniteit mee had waren bijvoorbeeld Georg Trakl & Frank Stanford.

Hij zou een brief achter hebben gelaten, maar niemand weet waar die is, of wat er in stond.

Jarenlang heeft Letters to a stranger een ware cultstatus gekend, en bleek voor veel jongeren een aanleiding te zijn om ook te gaan schrijven. Sinds enkele jaren is de bundel ook buiten het antiquarische circuit weer gewoon verkrijgbaar.

Dragging the lake

They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks.

Where the oak throws its handful of shadows

Children are gathering fireflies.

I wait in the deep olive flux

As their cries ricochet out of the dark.

Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak.

 

It foists its mouthful of sibilants

On a sky involved with a stillborn moon,

On the stock-still cottages. I lean

Into the dark. On tiny splints,

One trellised rose is folding back

Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake.

 

Rowboats bob on the thick dark

Over my head. My fingers wave

Goodbye, remember me. I love

This cold, these captive stars. I shake

My blanket of shadows. I breathe in:

Dark replenishes my two wineskins.

 

My eyes are huge, two washed-out mollusks.

Oars fall, a shower of violet spray.

When will my hosts deliver me,

Tearing me with their wooden hooks?

Lights flicker where my live heart kicked.

I taste pine gum, they have me hooked.

 

They reel me in, a displaced anchor.

The cygnets scatter. I rise, I nod,

Wrapped in a jacket of dark weed.

I dangle, I am growing pure,

I fester on this wooden prong.

An angry nail is in my tongue.

Letters to a stranger

I

In April we will pierce his body.

It is March. Snow is dust over the branches.

A pony hunches in the orchard.

I stand at the frozen mouth of the river,

Thinking of you.

In the house where you live

Frost glitters on the windows

Like uncounted pieces of silver.

Already they are preparing the wine and the bread.

II

The field is banked with purple asters

And a spill of mustard flowers.

The earth has taken on terrible proportions.

Out in an unused meadow

The wildflowers have already covered

The delicate bones of an Indian.

Bees are flying across the meadow

To a hive under the rafters of the barn.

Someone is leading a horse with crippled bones

Into the spikes of clover.

III

Alexander died this morning,

Leaving his worldly possessions

To the strongest.

I watched an empire fade across his lips.

They propped him in the sun a while,

And then three women came to scour his body

Like a continent.

I am afraid of what the world will do.

Only this afternoon

I heard two worms conversing

In the shadow of his breastbone.

I slipped out of the palace

And entered a vein of gillyflowers

On the edge of potter’s field.

I will not be missed.

No one even noticed.

IV

I have been thinking of the son

I would like to have.

The leaves have all gone yellow

Overnight, wrinkling like hands

In the updraught.

I drove my car by the creek

Because I had nowhere else to go.

The milkweed’s delicate closet had been fractured,

Filling the air with rumors.

Despite all I could do, the sumac

Had taken on the color of a mouth.

Tonight, I perceive the young girls

In my mother’s blood

Letting their seed pass by unnoticed,

A red nativity.

V

Last night they dragged the canal

For an old man’s body.

Now he is singing for a hook

Just below water level.

A branch of ice is splitting open

Across each window,

And snow is dismantling the weeds

Like the breakable furniture of a boudoir.

I have been rereading your letters.

It is too cold for a virgin birth to occur

Even in the frosty suburbs

Of a wildflower.

VI

I have learned to camouflage myself in church,

Masking my body

With the body of a saint.

Last night frost glazed the face of Mary Magdalene,

And snow rode up to the altar windows.

Before morning, the sparrows came down

To the body of Saint Francis.

Now he is upholstered in oak leaves

Like a living room chair.

This morning we are preparing a crucifixion.

I am thinking of you now.

With the velvet at my knees

And the silverware shining on the altar

And the stained glass moving out of focus

And the cross veiled in black,

I am present for the news of an enormous death.

I take the bread on my tongue

Like one of Christ’s fingers,

And the wine rides through my breast

Like a dark hearse.

All the while I am thinking of you.

An avalanche of white carnations

Is drifting across your voice

As it drifts across the voices of confession.

But the snow keeps whispering of you over and over.

 

 

Reasons

 

For our own private reasons

We live in each other for an hour.

Stranger, I take your body and its seasons,

Aware the moon has gone a little sour

 

For us. The moon hangs up there like a stone

Shaken out of its proper setting.

We lie down in each other. We lie down alone

and watch the moon’s flawed marble getting

 

Out of hand. What are the dead doing tonight?

The padlocks of their tongues embrace the black,

Each syllable locked in place, tucked out of sight.

Even this moon could never pull them back,

 

Even if it held them in its arms

And weighed them down with stones,

Took them entirely on their own terms

And piled the orchard’s blossom on their bones.

 

I am aware of your body and its dangers.

I spread my cloak for you in leafy weather

Where other fugitives and other strangers

Will put their mouths together.

 

Two aunts
 

When I feel the old hunger coming on,

I think of my two great-aunts,

A farmer’s daughters,

Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota.

I imagine the dark baron

Riding out of their mouths,

Thick-skinned and girded

Against disaster, swathed

In cuirass and chainmail and a curse.

My hunger was theirs

Too long ago. It swims in my blood,

Groping for a foothold.

It is the dark I thrust my tongue against,

The wine and the delicate symphony

That makes my head tick so exquisitely

Tonight. My ladies,

My dusky girls, I see you

With your bustles puffed up like life preservers,

Your needlepoint rose garden,

Your George Eliot coiffures,

Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine.

You both took heroin.

Your father never noticed.

You sprinkled it in your oatmeal,

Embroidered doilies with it,

Ate it like a last supper

At midnight. I know what you meant.

There was always the hunger,

The death of small things

Somewhere in your body,

The children that would never

Take place in either of you.

You were a garden of lost letters.

A lust inhabited your veins.

My addicts,

The village spoke of you.

Under your parasols, two rose windows,

The world swam with color.

Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak,

You escaped the indecisions

Your blood has handed down

To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses

As if they might have ferried you

Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance.

I see you ride the black hills of my mind,

Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,

Galloping

In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware

Of something I inherited,

The doubt,

The fear,

The needle point of speech,

The hunger you passed down that I

Possess.