Autumn in the Wings

Twigs’ lush medium is converting to
calligraphy, the dismissal of leaves
to launch its winter forewarning. Laden
with late acorns, squirrels chuck-chuck meaningless
memos, counter-balance full bellies, tails
unfurled. I am embracing—keepsaking—
the unscrolling calendar, harvesting
days tossed my way, the prodigious burden
of nows. Hunters will bruise this calm soon, but
until then it’s choirs of jays, cranes, and crows.

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
clamoured 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.

Leaf Fall

Asymmetric chandeliers instigate
their rhapsodic drop, the ruddling scumble-
trove of falling leaves and epiphanies
whose sillage shellacs paw, pelt, and breezes.
Trapezes sling these acrobatic hues
into bold arcs, risky spins, pronounced turns
before alights the wind-borne troupe of the
trees. Stippled bark akin to camo backs
the show, and cursive limbs announce the new
season: caesura ending summer’s song.

For Therapy, I Mix Metaphors

From a frozen wedge of machine-split pine,
tossed on this settling fire, one frayed, martyred
fibre curls back and away like a wire, then
flares, a flame racing the length of a fuse.
Imagine this my innermost strand, a barely-dirt
two-track off Frost’s road less traveled, a thin,
trembling thread of desire, the uncharted blue vein
of a tundral highway. Or in some dread cloister
it dreams, and a sillier spirit suddenly moves—
like four fresh fingers over flamenco frets,
like dumb elegance uttering Old Florentine,
never meaning one of its crooning words.
It might dance—Tejano, Zydeco, any twenty
Liebeslieder Waltzes, any juking jumble
of a barrel-house blues—wherever arose
an arousing tune, the thrum of a Kenyan’s
drumming, the merest notion of Motown soul.
I do know: there must be this lost but lively cord,
an original nerve, perhaps abandoned, or jammed
as if into an airless cavity of my old house.
It waits, to spark, to catch, its insulated nest
punctured by the stray tip of a driven nail.
It craves some risky remodelling, that annoying
era of air compressor, plaster grit, dumpster,
and the exuberant exhalation of ancient dust.

Slackening Observed

A cardinal, its heaven’s sound, the winter’s
effervescent rag with salutating
gait. Notes etch, sun foils, and cathedralic
miles enlarge the whispering. To centre
oneself, to murmur, to intercept the
synchronizing run that’s rioting, is
as longingly still as the slope outside
the city’s heaves, the barn-red-confetti’d
woods, the uniform crisp of autumn days,
shallows iced to the shoreline, valley’s dream.

A Moment Depends Not Just on its Moment

You’d like to move on beyond mean memory,
skirt that peopled, hollow squalor, pack up
your numerous mind encampments
whose smoky cook fires now flicker, now
flare on this or that nostalgic hillside—
sometimes like coded reminders, sometimes
like brash blazes arousing anything
but simpering gratitude for a brainscape
stippled with so-called love. But then
a random moment’s rush of fragrant pine
rises also from vague beds of heady needles
in your rural past. And today’s savouring
of your young son’s self-liberation emerges
from its oblivious storage of almost forty years.
And the resuscitating pulse in a flagrant poem
owes a measure of its happy current to your
decades of emotional prohibition, your
suspension in the numb ice of wordlessness.
A generous peace depends on your history’s
stingy drudgery, and a restful season
of seeing who you might really be
depends on the eons of not letting being, on
the contrast with not knowing you didn’t see.

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.

D. R. James, a year+ into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.

You can find more of D.R.’s work here on Ink Pantry.