Mobius Trip
I flinch then I drift into reverie…
wing-swept and flake-wept to swooping footpaths
past a curved door’s stoop, rapt in a gashed globe
that’s ascending, descending, clutched embrace:
alarmed commuter, reconstituted
deserter, survivor of unveiling.
What other to do but hover then plunge,
lunge then stall? When you’re small, mote-sloughed, speck-hid
like a splinter, squad-shirked, dislodged, slivered,
every current re-collects, returns you.
—first published in Enclave (of Entropy Magazine)
Cement Garden
It’s spring again, silvery buds on branches,
the garden violent with hydrangea sticks.
Grandma has wandered to her front-porch chair.
There, her toes barely touch the floor, her gown
screens her sighing knees, her newspaper masks
sink and cupboard undulating behind
her eyes. Apology’s necessary:
this is not her style. Beyond the gate flash
lime and lemon groves along steep park lanes,
their peeled bone crash-glittering in her sleep.
—first published in The Ekphrastic Review
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 gray 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.
—first published in Trampoline
Gifts Retrievable
—There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth.
—Czeslaw Milosz
The puzzled tongue of mourning nudges me
into a collar familiar as rust:
lost cat, dead dad, narrow meaning masked as
bosses, the inching hoard of violence.
Around the edges, iridescent fists
plot strokes to leap the tone-deaf distances.
Moaning chokes the blood and rumblings morph
dodging mouths into claims raised in silence.
Such ripped currents roil the original
prism that’s still flashing scrubbed face, fresh scent.
—first published in Main Street Rag
Slate Cleaned on the Bluff
Up here, the intervals of lumbering waves
at dawn signal churning, pebble-riven
sculpting by water’s paws: crucible like
a cleanse. Low clouds, contesting gravity,
fabricate braids of grey sleeves embracing
that stoical landscape staged below: trace
of tranquilizing vapor, balm from a
macrocosmic bowl. Catharsis accrues
between the two. Concession remedies
sullen revenge. Horizon reconciles.
—first published in The Metaworker
D. R. James, recently retired from
nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies,
lives, writes, bird-watches, and cycles 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 prose
and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online
anthologies and journals.
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