James Robert Rudolph- Three Poems

James Robert Rudolph is a retired psychologist and teacher having returned to old haunts in northern New Mexico after a busy career in Minneapolis.  He believes in old-style magical realism, that inspired by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the high desert, and the deep, broad sky of the American mountain west.  Recent poems have appeared in The Artistic Muse, Mad Swirl, and Bewildering Stories, among others.

Lazarus Stirred

Old ice age spring, thaws

cold crystals in blue waters

flow slow, at first a seeping then

a pulsing, baby geyser pumping

through antique rocks the vital taste 

of nothing, pure on the tongue,

and Lazarus stirs.

Suddenly a freshet, now a cataract

a force foaming and green to pound

the shoulders of rocks and carry

the goo of new life dropped silently

in shallow eddies, alluvial shoals of

muck and ooze as the torrent

headlong, irresistible, thrusts on.

So I am redeemed

I am risen I am juiced with

a desire hard and unbitter and raw 

that flushes my cavities red and full.

The Galaxy’s Morality Play

Stars are angels’ eyes

green oceans slosh their rims

with salty tears, angels,

wings pinned back, crowd

the blue vault to see

man the martyr creature

exhibit his pox and palsies

as pools of pity cool feet

unshod, long traveled.

Our circling ball a stage

this celestial cynosure circling

the peopled heavens so to see

the lesser among them so to see

their afflictions draining discharge

into absorbing space so to see

the wages of sin, wages of sin.

To move the divine only

exquisite torment here

no sundered rough beast but

the marred faces of 

God’s children made of

clay brown and red.  

January Thaw

A dropping winter sun

lights the sky a cheating blue--

it plays off the white of snow--

a blue just beyond the painter’s fingers,

the color of sky when a hero returns home.

The wind blowing off mounting snow, 

on lumpy hills, poorly hidden,

and lakes long iced over,

a wind that smells of the absence of other things.

Stick trees, and piney, Christmas trees

comb the wind, such fine, old sounds,

the snow loosed off branches green-black in this light,

snow disappearing, like tiny summer moths

released skyward by the handful,

into a crowd of gathering stars.