Ode to Sycamores
Not helplessness;
But a sort of timelessness,
The understanding
That will can only take you so far.
You leave behind lust
That caused you to deceive each other
With whispers of mutuality
When need was only singular;
Now the cores of your beings
Aren't reaching for something
But for each other.
You begin to say, oh, god,
Which are the words we use
To express our humility
In these moments, our compassion;
Perhaps her lips are on your neck,
Perhaps your lips are on her neck—
The idea there are necks at all
In this lifting up, or that you thought
There were two of them
When you began,
Is astonishing, and delightful,
And one of the myriad lovely things
About you the brain—
Not only not slowing down,
But speeding up, along for the ride
Now, like a dog in a car window—
Has noted in passing.
And the scent of ambrosia—
You thought it would be
Some kind of clear fine
Wine that made the brain
A metaphor for the body—
So you are surprised
At its muskiness, its wetness,
Like a stand of sycamores in spring;
And you are gods now,
But gods under the moon,
Not someone’s idea of the moon.
–James Cummins
When my wife, Maureen, and I first got married, we made love one night alongside the Iowa River. It was romantic in conception, a little less so in execution. Between us and the lovely full moon were a lot of mosquitoes; and the "rich black fertile Iowa soil" turned out to be rather unyielding, though I took the bottom to gallantly cushion my willing-to-go-along-with-this-up-to-a-point bride. (And, okay, from preference.) But the poem itself didn't take shape for decades until one time I was driving along on a sunny day while our apricot standard poodle, Bella, who, after Maureen and our two daughters, I loved more than any sentient being in the universe, was enjoying the sun and the wind with her head resting out the back window. She turned and looked at me with such happiness that the two moments fused as one, like Vardaman's mother and the fish. I then found an old notebook with some early attempts and finished the poem.
–James Cummins
Jim Cummins was raised in a canebrake by an old mama lion. No, he's just a midwestern boy through-and-through, who's become a cray-cray old man who never leaves his house except to get booster shots. Recently, he purchased a lot of stock in Ivermectin.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirteen): James Cummins [by Angela Ball]
A standard-issue ode devotes itself single-mindedly to its announced subject. Not this one. We find ourselves inside a poem of “compassion”: passion compounded; a concentration lacking the expansiveness we associate with the ode; the result, perhaps, of long togetherness, a shared “you,” broken to emphasize its unity: “Perhaps her lips are on your neck, / Perhaps your lips are on her neck”; broken again in order to praise: “one of the myriad lovely things / About you your brain— / Not only not slowing down, / But speeding up, along for the ride / Now, like a dog in a car window—. . .”
Suddenly, near the close, the sycamores rise from the poem’s concentration as a surprising simile for “the scent of ambrosia,” a bodily redolence, not cerebral or soul-like. Sycamores’ chief beauty may be that they are open in how they accommodate to growth, their bark visibly breaking. James Cummins’s “Ode to Sycamores” opens at its close, addressing what might be the widest problem of postmodernism, as analyzed by Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and Roland Barthes’s “Operation Margarine”: the replacement of originals with simulacra, the real with easy nostalgia:
“But you are gods now / But gods under the moon, / Not someone’s idea of the moon.”
–Angela Ball