James Najarian: Kleptomania

Start simply. Thieve small.
And stay on the ball.
Take nothing that matters—
     lost screws, ticket stubs, French fries from platters.

Now steal something better:
a breath or a letter.
Then take someone’s time.
     Practice makes perfect, and the perfect crime.

Then swipe the covers,
(the names of old lovers
will give you some tips).
     Kisses for others you take on the lips.

Loot tongues for secrets—it’s
using your wits,
and occasions abound.
     Astounding what people leave lying around!

Why not go on?
Be a Pro of a Con—
filch a heart for a day.
     as soon as you’re done with it, throw it away—

or keep it for longer.
Your skills will get stronger.
Who’s keeping tabs?
     Everything, everyone, is up for grabs.


© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. All rights reserved.

James Najarian: The Dark Ages

I

For years, my mother shuttled from her garden

to the stove, from barn to sewing room to sons,

her life like an unopened work of history.

Then came the silences. Was she tired? Bored?

She hovered in her kitchen the whole day.

Skillets and glassware tumbled from her hands,

her face a cast of lead. Her garden shrank

to towering, weedy greens and wiry vines.

We did not plow it for the coming year.

II

Late Roman Britain had begun to turn

even before the soldiers were withdrawn.

With the seas unguarded, little was brought in.

Ale and lard replaced Rome’s wine and oil.

The towns dispersed, as townsfolk headed to

the countryside to try the earth. At first,

the city fathers decently tore down

deserted baths and temples. Villas crumbled.

Those who stayed grew barley in the ruins.

III

She had trouble walking, or rather starting

walking -- her feet seemed bolted to the ground,

the brain not ordering its provinces.

She spoke a rote “no, thank you”; rarely “yes.”

Her kingdom dwindled to a bed and toilet--

a quilt she planned still hanging from the wall,

bright calicoes once basted to white flannel,

seed-packets, knitting, quiet as offerings --

her life now archaeology around her.

IV

Eventually, Rome took its army home.

With Rome went every skill. The coarse pots made

in native kilns, declined, then disappeared.

Foundries halted, and with them nails vanished.

The people foundered barefoot in the mud

as shoes could not be made--or coffins either.

The dead were thrown directly in the ground.

Silt clogged the cities’ sewers. Canterbury

dwindled to a pasture, York a marsh.

V

In daylight she may keen for hours, unaware.

All night she shrieks, but does not hear her sounds.

She grips a toy she’s had since she was small,

a drowsy chimpanzee whose eyelids close.

Nurses have put her in a safe low bed;

half-buried in her sheets, she is a baby

lost in a little boat. She knows my name,

but wails, and can’t say why. At times I can

make out a single word: “no, no, no, no.”

VI

The towns and villages have emptied out.

We gather in our clans amid the dregs,

atop a hill-crest or a crumbled fort,

dwelling among the swine we kill each fall,

gorging because we cannot let them waste.

Our women scrounge for bits of bead and bronze.

They roast our gritty roots right in the fire,

or cook in cauldrons dug from ancient graves,

sepulchri: pots that once held human ashes.

James Najarian Wins 6th Annual Frost Farm Prize for Poetry

Reprinted from the Armenian Weekly

DERRY, N.H.—The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, N.H., and the Hyla Brook Poets announced that the winner of the 6th Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry is James Najarian of Auburndale, Mass., for his blank verse poem, “The Dark Ages.”

The prize was judged by David J. Rothman, Director of Western State Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Najarian receives $1,000, and publication in The Evansville Review. He will also be a featured reader at the Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, on Fri., June 17, at 7 p.m. The reading kicks off the second annual Frost Farm Poetry Conference (June 17-19).

“‘The Dark Ages’ participates in what has become, over the last several decades, a recognizable sub-genre of the elegy, even if it is an elegy of death-in-life: the Alzheimer’s poem. This poem differs from all others on this theme I have ever read, however, in its successful use of an extended metaphor, in which the poet implicitly compares the mother’s loss of memory to the aftermath of the Roman departure from Britain. The poem’s six stanzas of blank verse, each nine lines long, alternate starkly between painfully clear-eyed description of the mother’s decline, and comparably evocative reimagining of the advent of ‘the dark ages,’ with the loss of wine and oil, the abandonment of towns, the vanishing of nails and so on,” said Rothman about Najarian’s poem, adding, “The result of such a strategy might have seemed predictable, but with an unsentimental eloquence and restraint that only make the unstated pain and loss that much more powerful, the poet never rhetorically asserts the connection between the alternating sections, but simply lets them stand and resonate with each other until the personal and the historical merge in ways that illuminate both. This is compelling, masterful work, not only technically adroit but also thematically fierce and focused, and emotionally profound: an intense yet also measured depiction of destruction and grief.”

Rothman went on, “With more than 600 entries, this year’s submissions to the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry presented a tremendous range of subjects, themes, tones, styles and techniques. After spending many hours with them, my overwhelming impression is that hundreds upon hundreds of poets continue to care about craft.”

Najarian grew up on a goat farm near Kempton, Pennsylvania. He teaches nineteenth-century poetry and prose at Boston College, where he directs the Ph.D. program in English and edits the scholarly journal Religion and the Arts. His poetry has been published in West Branch, Christianity and Literature, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Literary Imagination, and other journals. He also published a scholarly monograph, Victorian Keats, with Palgrave Macmillan. His manuscript of poems, An Introduction to the Devout Life, has made finalist several times at volume contests, and is seeking a publisher.

The judge read all 646 anonymous entries and, in addition to selecting the winner, chose six poems for special recognition as Finalists and Honorable Mentions:

Finalists 

“Julia Hungry” by Hannah Poston of Ann Arbor, Mich.

“The Chromatist” by Aaron Poochigian of New York, N.Y.

“Crush” by Brian Brodeur of Richmond, Ind.

Honorable Mentions

“Memento” by Catherine Chandler, Saint-Lazare, Quebec, Canada

“Black Impala” by Jon Volkmer of Telford, Pa.

“The Undersigned” by Aaron Poochigian of New York, N.Y.

About Frost Farm Poetry

Frost Farm Poetry’s mission is to support the writing and reading of poetry, especially metrical poetry. The Hyla Brook Poets started in 2008 as a monthly poetry workshop. In March 2009, the monthly Hyla Brook Reading Series launched with readings by emerging poets as well as luminaries such as Maxine Kumin, Sharon Olds and Richard Blanco. From there, the Frost Farm Poetry Prize for metrical poetry was introduced in 2010, with the Frost Farm Poetry Conference beginning in 2015.

http://www.frostfarmpoetry.org/prize/

James Najarian: Longed-for Rain

For weeks, the soil translated into dust,

Then lint, then ash, and at last
Into smoke. The creek compressed
Itself to an unwilling path of stone.
Its stain lined the valley’s span.
Lamb’s quarter slumped in the lane.
Then, in an afternoon, the sky grew dim,
Trembling with an ancient hum.
In the pool of Siloam
I wiped my useless eyes of grime and spit.
Let the ears unbuckle, and the eyes unbolt.

James Najarian: Travelogue

Our travel papers are seldom in order.
We lack a visa, or the proper stamps.
More often than not, we're stopped at the border,

Our documents held to the light, just like this.
Our endorsements are in the wrong color ink,
Our signatures void, our persons suspicious.

This isn't the first time we've been refused entry.
You are a country we will never visit.
We view your coast from a deck on the sea,

Or get a hold of photographs, somewhere.
The kind of pictures that reveal nothing –
Cloudy landscapes taken from the air –

They tell us nothing we're not meant to know.
No one responds to calls at the consulate.
There's no national airline or tourist bureau.

You are a nation whose borders are closed:
A tiny state in the hills, like Bhutan.
The ridges and valleys stay unexposed.

Or you are a gap on the map of the world;
Your body, a continent, could be Antartica:
Cool, pale, and barely explored;

It could be perilous – the Khyber Pass,
A place without settlers – the Serengeti,
Or a place found only on a prewar atlas

Where half the globe is either pink or blue
Ubangi-Shari, or Bechuanaland,
Or someplace even harder to get to:

Cathay, Cibola, Lemuria, Mu.

James Najarian: With the Herd

Late in the afternoon, the goats ascend
the stubbled hills in strictest precedence
first, the "queen," the strongest of the does,
then each goat in order of her rank,
trailed by her skipping kids-then yearlings,
and at the end the old, complaining ones.
The herd will linger near the tractor paths
nimbly lipping kernels from bare roots,
craning their earthbound necks for maple leaves,
dowsing for dandelion and dock. Most evenings
they return, in the same, now satiated line.

But some desks, the riches are too much for them;
they squander hours with their relentless mouths.
The sun drops anonymous into the damp
and they find themselves abandoned in blind fields—
while you, indoors, are waiting for the thump
of their returning hooves-and hearing nothing.
You must give up on your accustomed walls
to hoof and blunder through the black alone.
Flashlight in hand and calling to no answer,
you shine your flimsy beam on forest edges,
illuminating vines and sumac, until
you stumble on them unexpectedly
silent and watchful, clustered in a circle,
the nannies fortressing the kids within,
just as their ancestors must have, outside
the tents of Ishmael or Abraham.
Stop calling them. Stand still. They will not stir
until you turn the light on your known face,
their weak eyes recognize and understand.
Now, rising as a body, they will follow you,
grateful and hushed as only they can be.
Together, you will find your way back home.


This poem appeared in the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of Westbranch
Copyright © James Najarian

James Najarian grew up on a goat farm in northern Berks country, Pennsylvania. He has published poetry in small literary journals including Ararat, Tar River Poetry,Watershed, and West Branch. He teaches Romantic and Victorian literature at Boston College. He is the author of a critical work entitled Victorian Keats: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Desire, (Palgrave Macmillan 2002) and lives in the Brighton section of Boston.