January 2024
Bio Note: A year-plus into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, I live, read, write, cycle with my psychotherapist wife, and care-give a now blind old cat in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. My latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and my prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.
If god were gentle
Let us believe in a strong god, who makes the oceans roar and the wind crack about our ears… For we are envious of this, and to believe in a gentle god, therefore, does not become us. —John Haines, “Pictures and Parables, IV” But if god were gentle, here’s what would become us: bluest sky, the sun-warmed porch, both beholding a glorious afternoon; a couple of hummers buzzing one another and synthetic flowers strung from the eaves of drowsy cottages in their staggered, settled rows; patches of heat, patches of swifter cool, gulls and butterflies riding the easy overlap; the oblivious bees busiest among the wine-red geraniums; the breeze-borne pine; the near swish along a length of shore. This perfect day— and then a doze, a little more of sailing the muddling resubmergence into all of a life that’s come before— a convergence too complex to register, though no less corporeal for its mysteries, for its streams, for its coursing through the unwished, the essential, sorrows.
Originally published in A Little Instability without Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2006)
Maybe they're brothers,
these two, slow-riding a clown-tiny bicycle up my gradual hill, one, slightly larger, pedaling, swaying over the seat, the other, lock-kneed astride the rear tire, feet fixed to steel axle pegs, his two hands holding the bigger boy’s hips above the pistons of his thighs. Meanwhile, their happy chatter, which I can hear but not quite make out, goes on nonstop even when the pedaler’s left slip-on slips off and the smaller, touching down on the run, retrieves and positions it to slip back on. Seamless, like a two-man bob-sled crew, except to resume an ascent, they regroup and push off, wobbly then steady as before, and vanish around the corner toward the convenience store. Or maybe they’re best friends, like Jimmy and me, in’63, him pedaling, me hanging on.
Originally published in Talking River
©2024 D. R. James
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