November 2022
Bio Note: I've just recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies and am amazed by how quickly I have shifted out of that previous life. Now I am completely content to live, veg, birdwatch, write (including the occasional freelance writing or editing job), and cycle with my psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. My latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020).
Flip Requiem
Only black-and-tan clumps cling anymore to our oaks (raking finally making sense), which stand silent as pickets this side of winter’s no-longer fierce or precise approach. I’m over a father’s death, an angry mother’s post-mortem reach (though there it is again), the delusion that autumn’s demise warns us of anything. Those fears? Fading—their threatening hues mere harmless colors after all. Instead, a dogwood’s scrawny pecs spread stripped limbs to greet us into the new season’s breach, a wind-scrambled blueprint of tangled twigs, leaf eddies, and rain. What’s to come used to command such aching concentration, demands collected in the heart. Now, subdued, it signals no sad story tracking itself across some dismal arena dressed in black, elegiac notes—but noodles muted scales that free the blood and coast us toward a more cordial space: a flip requiem, perhaps, for chronic requiems.
Originally published in I-70 Review
©2022 D. R. James
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