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.

*This poem was first published in Ruminate

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.

*This poem was first published in Backchannels

After the Gale

Ivory spines disguise the oaks’ south sides,

slivers of sunshine lightening their rough

trunks. What furrowed pallor, what dignity:

spires anchored to all others underneath,

delight clad in the plucked bones of winter.

What diligence, what staid bystanding: a

throng of distinct ascetics, enmeshed horde

of collective loners. It’s as if they’re

avowing how steadfastness, soon resumed,

enroots in you your essential locale.

*This poem was first published in MORIA

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D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

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