From nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
—Alexander Pope
You might be mildly surprised to learn,
if you haven’t Wikipedia’d it like I,
that demons (fallen) fall between (unfallen)
angels and the ranked array of humans—
kings to commoners—and that the wild
suspend above domesticated animals,
prized stones then metals above all minerals.
But no more surprised than I in 2006
and again in 2009 when my father
then my mother died, and I found
I’d climbed the chain a link by
vacating complicated Son. Hardly
the patriarchal type, I felt like those ‘divine’
boys who became kings by default
but deferred to regents—or princesses,
my sisters having long been the go-to girls.
Grandson had hung benignly empty since
the 80s, but this ascent asserted something
fixed—at least for me, my own four sons
soon to follow suit once I succumbed.
What healthy offspring feels the enemy’s
in everything, from his siblings’ eulogies
to the after-funeral well-wishings? Why now
so tender, when all those years so numb?
A revelation, at the least, devastation
not close to the worst, that train of transition,
the drinking of that cup, so different than
whatever’d stunned before. I’d bumped
a ceiling, hit an inevitable dead end,
reached a mythical crossroads without
an oracle, meanwhile missing all oases
in that wry desert of metaphor. Some
sons rise ready for the role. I, dangling
like bait over an abyss, glimpsed
a crevasse that smacked of the grave.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press). www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage