August 2021
Bio Note: If it weren't for birds--oh, and a divorce, of course, that tried-and-true artistic catalyst--I doubt I would ever have started writing poems at almost 50. Now it's been a couple of decades, and my most recent of nine collections is Flip Requiem from Dos Madres Press (2020).
I Don’t Know the Biochemistry
of a Hummingbird
I can only wonder at this blurred whir of evidence, clouded in the blue fan of a thousand wings. I want to feel their million beats per second on my beard and lashes, reel from each swig, the dozen manic intervals, stomach a zoom to the forsythia, whose scream of tender yellow faded and fell last week. How can mere filaments in tiny shoulders flex and reflex so fast? How can miniscule sipping, the sucking through a needle beak, fuel a miniature tyrant’s relentless burn? Then, in the resting, which is not even a breath, how rapid the saturation of liquid sugar into blood, into wing muscle, into instinctual motive for a horizontal life? And how rapid the depletion?
Originally published in Diner
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 neighbor’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.
Originally published in Ruminate
©2021 D. R. James
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL