Full text--James: A Fantasia
James avoided the counterboy’s glare (he was a dark and sultry island, James thought; with piles of compost, and barbed wire) and paid with exact change, for which he had picked through his change cup that morning in preparation, to avoid unnecessary complication. Having acquired his coffee he sat blankly at one of the sleek tables, hand curled around the Styrofoam cup with a slight unconscious tension. His loose gaze hovered somewhere in front of the picture window. His thoughts were occupied with an accustomed set of worries, but today there was something else taking shape behind their swarming: something pointed and waxy and orange.
From the New Issue
Now. Think it and it’s gone. It can drive a philosopher crazy. But the poet has found a way to build a house in now, a hermitage. Not only can he dwell in this now indefinitely, he can invite others into it. And yet no matter how many respond to the invitation, the hermitage of the poem remains a place of pristine solitude.
The hairsplitsecond of the philosophers’ now becomes the magnified and luminous eternal now of poetry. Its span, “the span of winter afternoons,” opens into the immeasurable, “between the hollow moon’s two distant ends.” With his first sentence, the poet squanders two and a half of his four lines. But as the sentences grow shorter, they purify, so that the next two sentences each equal, if they do not surpass, the first one in content.Poetry
I thought the thing was fully pitched;
its kicked up limbs had gone knee high,
daring themselves to show some more...