D.R. James

Two Poems

Entering Winter with a Line from Gwendolyn Brooks

Horizon’s burst-smear of pink nonchalance

forgets: We are things of dry hours and the

involuntary plan. In winter’s vise

I’ll wrestle — flail! — stampedes of elegies,

pendulums of memory, sidestepping

swathes of snow-fall brindled with late oak leaves’

yieldings: autumn’s ceding. But from this blunt

and silhouetted terrain, ranging out

tactically, cautious in my happenstance,

I will still delight — plod, but still ignite.

previously published in Amethyst Review.

Contrails

One answer lies in the tropospheric molecules scattering

short blue waves and vapor meeting minus-sixty. But

what’s the burning question? What orders the eye, the

brain, to catch all the colors after rain? What comprehends

a handful of sand, November’s endless branches of birds?

I’m bowed down by the simply phenomenal, the asymmetric

stain of mulberry crushed on concrete, what was sown that

now reveals its long green line. Yesterday, mountainous

clouds turned our Midwest horizon into I-76’s Wiggins’s

vision of the Colorado Rockies, and any headfirst plunge

off my cautious stage in this life supplies the slickest look

at all I never see. Forget insipid interpretations, how the jet

streaking seven miles above your sweetheart blazes the trail

connecting her to you. In a blink, or maybe in a day, those

contrails, heavy as the thin air they cleave, will leave you,

expanding, disbandingly unparalleled into a marbled blue.

previously published in Rattle.

D. R. James, now retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods and along the Lake Michigan shore near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020).

amazon author page: /drjamesauthorpage

D.R. James

Two Poems

Entering Winter with a Line from Gwendolyn Brooks

Horizon’s burst-smear of pink nonchalance

forgets: We are things of dry hours and the

involuntary plan. In winter’s vise

I’ll wrestle — flail! — stampedes of elegies,

pendulums of memory, sidestepping

swathes of snow-fall brindled with late oak leaves’

yieldings: autumn’s ceding. But from this blunt

and silhouetted terrain, ranging out

tactically, cautious in my happenstance,

I will still delight — plod, but still ignite.

previously published in Amethyst Review.

Contrails

One answer lies in the tropospheric molecules scattering

short blue waves and vapor meeting minus-sixty. But

what’s the burning question? What orders the eye, the

brain, to catch all the colors after rain? What comprehends

a handful of sand, November’s endless branches of birds?

I’m bowed down by the simply phenomenal, the asymmetric

stain of mulberry crushed on concrete, what was sown that

now reveals its long green line. Yesterday, mountainous

clouds turned our Midwest horizon into I-76’s Wiggins’s

vision of the Colorado Rockies, and any headfirst plunge

off my cautious stage in this life supplies the slickest look

at all I never see. Forget insipid interpretations, how the jet

streaking seven miles above your sweetheart blazes the trail

connecting her to you. In a blink, or maybe in a day, those

contrails, heavy as the thin air they cleave, will leave you,

expanding, disbandingly unparalleled into a marbled blue.

previously published in Rattle.

D. R. James, now retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods and along the Lake Michigan shore near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020).

amazon author page: /drjamesauthorpage

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