December 2021
Bio Note: Though reliably indicated by the calendar, year's end nevertheless feels somewhat less inevitable these days. Yes, in our region geese still honk overhead, and harvest parties still mark, what, the end of summer or the lead-in to winter, but when, or if, the annual deep-freeze along our shore of Lake Michigan will ensue remains to be seen, and as I write, the Glasgow Climate Talks are about to begin, where I wouldn't say that optimism headlines the occasion. At least poetry can cut through it all, whether to warn or, more universally, to sustain and, in the midst, even entertain. I live in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, and my tenth collection, Mobius Trip, is just out from Dos Madres Press.
If Only I Moved by Instinct
Life has been a grand migration to where you are today! —well known wisdom I didn’t know! Otherwise, when those raggedy squadrons clamored overhead last evening— three V’s disarrayed like frayed arrow feathers, their leaders insistent as clowns with braying horns, honking for plane geometry— I would have taxied, sprinted, lifted arthriticly from water’s edge (granted more dodo than goose, my splayed toes just scuffing the webbed crests of waves), and elbowed my way into a rhythmic wedge to claim my slot in that mindless rotation toward the life-saving draft.
Originally published in Psychological Clock Pudding House Publications, 2007
Kissed-Off
Lord knows I’m a voodoo chil’. —Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Child Until that night a girl had only kissed me. Not I a girl. I was fifteen and for a year Jimi’d been telling me he was a voodoo chil’, yeah, and I wasn’t. No moon’d turned a fire red, and not one mountain lion’d found me there waitin’. Now I was going with Sue, at whose harvest party I’d do the kissing. Nervous and showing it, acting distractedly, voice shaking, our friends milling, I knew it was a now-or-never situation, even though I’d never ever and didn’t really know. Giddy and ridiculous, we slid into the stairwell, out of range of her parents in the kitchen, the kids below: the outskirts of our infinity…. We made eyes. We made small talk. But all I could think about was making my move. (If only I’d had a Venus witch’s ring.) Then inching my arm and chit-chatting her a little more, I aimed my face and kissed her! And oh, Lord, the gypsy was right: amazing and no big deal all at once. We kissed again (Lord knows I felt no pain) and for three months flew on as make-out fiends—until she dropped me for my best friend at her next party, my sixteen-and- been-kissed birthday—where I fell downright dea-ea-ead.
Originally published in The Wayward Sword
Great Lake Shore in Winter
The concentric silences of phantom isolation splash unscented across caked ice—expanse framed by violent but muted thundering of the congealed. Edge of weather razors faces, encircles eyelids, and its grimace arcs like light’s blue sigh. Still, one’s stitched tongue bawls outward in a brawling prayer, in bottled shouts to the wind, and names all the luxury gathered here. Here, one’s peace fronts one’s own ferocity.
Originally published in Backchannels
©2021 D. R. James
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