I’m pleased to introduce the work of the poet Jim Richards to Irreantum’s contemporary audience. People who have followed LDS literary writing for a number of years will probably already know Jim’s work—and yet, as someone in that category, I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to become aware of it. I’ll talk here about two poems of his that I enjoy very much, but I’m excited to hear that he not only has a collection that just came out with Finishing Line Press (Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right), but has another collection forthcoming from BCC Press, this time of more LDS-oriented work. I hope everyone will check out both of these books; I certainly plan to.
I’d like to introduce two specific poems of Richards’s that I like very much.
When you encounter “A Pebble” on the page, it looks like a sonnet. It seems to be about the right size, and it ends with a couplet, as sonnets do. I can’t help but feel I’m meant to notice this, since the word sonnet appears in the first line. And yet, when I count lines, I find that this poem falls a little short of the required 14 lines. I’m struck, then, by the way form follows theme—and also, life. Don’t we all fall a little short? Living in our crazy culture, we find sonnet-making—and other things, earnest things, honest, unironic yearnings—difficult, “awkward.” The poem yearns towards impact in the way it yearns towards sonnet-ness.
Here, Richards compares our awkward attempts at speaking to, and reaching for, God to a “lover’s / pebble tossed against glass”—a metaphor that might stand for the poem itself. The speaker sees God dimly beyond the pane and tosses this poem towards God. I love that word, pebble, its ordinariness, its lack of sparkle. My own efforts towards God feel like pebbles sometimes.
This poem haunts and provokes me. What is my own form of “silent mode,” I wonder, and how is it interfering with what I would speak—and hear—if I were in better tune (and, perhaps, less self-conscious about my own pebble-like nature)? I’m grateful to Richards for resisting silent mode and producing this poem for me to enjoy and learn from.
I love, and long for more, poems about parenting. The experience of watching, from close up, a soul learn to be in the world—a soul so dear to you that its pain can bring you to your knees—is prime material for poetry, as long as the poet is skillful and can resist sentimentality. Here, Richards’s deft use of specificity draws me emotionally into this scenario so that I am devastated along with the child and the parent. I recognize the longing of a parent who wants to protect the child from pain but knows the child must be allowed to move into knowledge. A parent can’t be the “one voice” to “save [the child] from the truth.” And would we have it so? It’s tempting, though we know better. Much of parenting is a reencounter with the forbidden fruit in the garden: is it good to allow a child to hurt in order to give him the full earthly experience (a knowledge of good and evil)?
Richards’s craft here is what enables him to pull off such a complicated, abstract experience for the reader. The specificity of the situation, as I said—its detailed set-up and slow build—is agonizing. But look, too, at the skillful use of language. The line break in the sixth stanza—“I try to explain but he/ doesn’t believe”—so much lives in that break for any parent who longs to protect a child. I can’t help hearing this phrase echoed at the end when I come to “He can’t believe it” and “believe, believe.” A parent weeps when he sees his child lose belief in the magic of the world and the good-intentions of his fellow beings. But, in the face of this fall from innocence, a parent hopes his child will find other things, truer things, to believe in, things that can be relied on. “Believe, believe” a parent pleads, hoping to move a child to a more mature faith. And what is it that a mature, realistic Mormon “just believes”? The necessity of leaving the garden, for one thing. The fact that it is a loving act for a parent to let a child grow.
Below are a few more of RIchards’s poems that I think you’ll enjoy.
— Darlene Young
The Other Dead Sea
I was born in a high desert valley,
surrounded by mountains
flanked with bitterbrush and striated
by the trails of mule deer
which I followed from childhood
into hidden groves and red caves,
over green passes and rocky peaks,
but never ranged too far
from home. Hence my love of lines
that lead upward and away
but leave an imprint of hoof
and dewclaw to retrace
when I am lost, when the blue shock
of heaven boils with clouds,
and Black Mountain veils its face
with snow. Once, I found a Marbled
Godwit tangled in orange twine
on the bank of the Jordan River.
I unwrapped it like a gift then gave it
to the stream and watched it float
under I-80 toward the Great Salt Lake
to be baptized in brine—a body
of water with no outlet apart from
giving up the ghost. I wandered home
on crooked paths, wondering
which side of the world I was on,
hungry gulls laughing above.
Plea to an Ancient Muse
Touch these stones
clear as glass
I have fashioned
from the mountainside.
Do not be angry
that I come wearing
only weakness.
Look on me in pity.
Do not suffer me
to cross the raging deep
swallowed up
and sealed in darkness.
Stretch out your hand
and with a fingertip
spark the fire that makes
a stone a star.
Octave
On the eighth day, Mother said:
Music will be your name, and you
will live among them—wretch,
commoner, king—and speak unseen
to their loss, to the petals of their joy
and hollow pain. They will forget me,
but in your harmony may they hear
and in your turbulence recall
their origin and end, eternity and time
as womb. And if they shun you,
or extract the echo of my voice,
abuse you, or dismember my mystery,
that hell devoid of harmony
will be their hole, where harp is plucked
and trumpet blown without a sound,
the drum as mute as the moon,
cymbals silent as stars before the sun.
But those who hear you, I will hear,
and though their hearts are rent
from birth to birth, your warm washing
and anointing song will soothe
the sorest lifespan in an instant
and deliver them anew to this rest: myself
holding them again, humming.
A Vision
Call it a bored boys’ game, I guess.
Here’s how to play: in the men’s restroom
at church, go into a stall, lock it then crawl out
under the door—your little necktie dragging
on the tile with no thought of uncleanness—
then stand beside your buddy at the urinal.
When an old man comes in, be quiet, pretend
to pee. Watch him try one and find it locked,
another, then another. Watch him bend
who was already bent so low, looking for
shoes, pants down around ankles, a presence
behind doors that are locked like miracles.
The more your buddy tries not to laugh
the funnier it seems, until you see a vision:
aged patriarch kneeling on a pattern of grout,
prostrating himself, working his way under
like a camel through a needle’s eye, seeking
relief from suffering boys cannot yet believe.
Eternal Increase
I dress for the endowment then sit and see
that I was made in God’s image and so
were you. Yet the tightness of my temple pants
disrupts my peace. Before my eyes the glory
of galaxies, stars, planets, earth, animals, Eve,
but the waistband of my old white pants
restricts my peace. I contemplate life before
this life and everlasting awe hereafter, yet
the confines of my holy slacks disturb my dream
of peace. Adam was afflicted with thorns, thistles,
briars, noxious weeds, and Eve with sorrow
greatly multiplied. Breaking on my mind’s shore
I hear waves, a sea of glass, and feel the sun,
but my cursed temple pants—a serpent around
my fruitful waist constricts my peace, my peace!
Aphorisms
The riverbed doesn’t believe it will become a canyon.
*
Time does not exist, but I keep looking at clocks.
*
If I listened as much as I talk, my prayers would be half silence.
*
At the waking hour, it’s easy to say arise and walk, but difficult to do.
*
I talk to God with a voice in my head. I listen with an ear in my heart.
*
What faith lacks in evidence it makes up for in witnesses.
*
The fact that I ever wear a necktie is sufficient to convince me that life is absurd.
*
Every shiny object offers a distorted reflection of yourself.
*
If a good book can change lives, a great book should change diapers.
*
Laid to rest, called home, slipped into eternity—dead metaphors.
*
I know where to click to save a document, but where do I click to damn it?
*
The power symbolized by that to which you sacrifice your time and attention is your God.
*
The world has yet to solve this riddle: The Book of Mormon.
*
Adult entertainment: childish.
*
Celiac: shall not live by bread alone.
*
Church: gym membership for the soul.
*
Courage: answering the teacher’s question when the answer is obvious.
*
Emojis: hieroglyphics of the next lost empire.
*
Eye contact: spirit touching spirit.
*
Fasting: preparing a feast you eat in the afterlife.
*
Fortune cookie: poor prophet, worse dessert.
*
God’s taunt: I know something you don’t know.
*
Happiness: teaching a child to snap.
*
Juxtaposition: a live body nailed to a dead tree.
*
Knowledge: faith that has been thoroughly tested.
*
Mirror: an objective object that objectifies us.
*
Mortality: slackline of sorrow suspended between two tall joys.
*
Multiple personalities: talking voice; praying voice; poetry reading voice.
*
Nostalgia: consolation prize for aging.
*
Oversimplification: a deceit designed to breed courage.
*
Passion: a flash flood.
*
Regret: a constant dripping.
*
Resentment: tweezers that bruise your future by pinching at the past.
*
Self-pity: a vampire who never lacks a victim.
*
Snow: winter’s way of saying shh.
*
Speculation: touching fruit to determine taste.
*
Summer: one cloud, endless interpretations.
*
Truth: loves company but will go alone.