May:
- Nuanced woo sleeves the trees absolutely,
limbs, trembling arabesques, re-enacting
their valedictive wave-shrug to April. - Constellations of light-green stars allay
the grey disposition: blazed artifice
erasing rafts of winter entropy. - Feathered seraphim inhabit the grove’s
ethereal umbrella (abstention
from fussy havoc not optional), daft
sanctuary for the ephemeral.
Great Blue Heron
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
—Mary Oliver, ‘October’
Busy inhabiting my world—
blazing car, radio blather,
coffee buzz that wouldn’t last—
I somehow caught a left-hand glimpse,
so quick I didn’t see you flinch,
yet so outstanding, you could’ve been
a plastic cousin to the prank flamingos
that another morning
enthralled my neighbour’s lawn.
Stark still, ankle-deep
in that transitory water,
only the one side, one-eyed,
wide as disbelief, you looked
just like you looked, posed
in the Natural History Museum,
1963: for again,
all those slender angles,
the spear of your bill,
that deathless intensity
marking your stick-form way, only
now in a mid-May puddle poised
between the intersecting rushes
eastbound, 196, southbound, 31.
And you, still doing
what you’ve never known
you do, still finding your life
wherever you find yourself—
while I, still fixated as always
on finding myself,
as if that were to find a life,
saw again how wildly
I am alive—
how I always want to know it.
When the Water and Sand Dance
When the water and sand dance, whence (whence?)
their music? What is that music? What sense, what
composition surfs itself in? Yes, the water—its
bazillion droplets, the mini-jetsam line it etches.
Yes, the sand—its gazillion granules, the sponging
gauze-and-muslin of them. But what but mind
imagines there’s music? Perhaps the end of your
century also hauled along its ton of sadness
as did mine. And perhaps the years have
finally worn it down to barely nothing of your
day-to-day. The sun and shadows play
again their fetching fine effects. The moon
and birds and even dying leaves relieve
your smallest residue of gloom. But
mind—must it remember anyway? And
is it therefore grateful, more than
happy in that moment, to cue its
private music, then tune your needy
ear to every measure when
the water and the sand dance?
Walking the Beach, We Show Our Ignorance about Stars, Constellations
before mentioning the dead ones
mixed in,
the snuffed ones,
how they’ve guided the race, we figure,
since long before the faintest flicker
of a first-hand myth;
but dead, even then,
and now, this side of infinitude,
this side, let’s say, of
Gilgamesh, how
the discerning words
of the long gone
still illumine our forever
primitive way.
Gazpacho for the Soul
How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
—Jane Kenyon
How much better even
to muster a quick sample
of what is better:
*
Finding the old apples
scattered out back for the deer
vanished while you slept.
*
Leaving the lit tree up
well past New Year—a new
who-cares tradition.
*
Not only seeing
but hearing your granddaughter’s
Instagram giggling.
*
Road-tripping to Chicago,
those skyscrapers arising
over the Ryan.
*
Doing burger Thursday
at the What Not, stressed-out
Will for your server.
*
Reading at 3 A. M.
with your reassuring spouse,
who can’t sleep either.
*
Cycling the back roads
south of the new house, turning
west toward the lakeshore.
*
Counting out haiku
with your deep-brown-eyed daughter:
re-frig-er-a-tor!
*
Switching from notebook
to computer, suspecting
a poem’s in sight.
*
Beating your fetching wife
to the punch: Happy ‘Leventh
Anniversary!
*
Having the silly luxury
to reckon a best order
for all that’s better.
True North
The lone crow on the lone pole
where the weathervane used to whirl
insinuates my need for misdirection.
He is an arrow of skittish attention,
of scant intention: the cock and hop,
the flick and caw toward anything
on the wind. Now angling east, now
south by southwest, he designates
with beak then disagreeing tail feathers,
with a lean-to and a shoulder scrunch,
with an attitude from his beady black eye—
as if he were ever the one to judge.
And once he’s spun like a pin on a binnacle
past all points of some madcap inner compass—
once the clouds have bowed to push on
and the grasses have waved their gratefulness—
he unfurls the shifty sails of his wings,
and the breeze relieves him of his post.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching university writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, USA. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his work has appeared internationally in a wide variety of anthologies and journals.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
