The Day I Got My Timing Down
It was in that phase of pure
sarcasm, midteens, when guys
work out an awkward stance,
work their pack’s patter
till they maybe have it. I don’t
really remember the day but
the single-moment wonder of hitting
my first come-back just right
by accident, then their free, true
laughter, my perfect follow-up,
the never-looking-back. From there
a career: from Senior Class Clown
to smooth talker in any crowd to
flip teacher spinning lit to wordsmith
chiseling chin-up come-backs
to the tin-clad sarcasms
every life dishes out as it
disarms or drops you or
leaves you hanging, slamming
its clanging locker door in your
gullible, stuttering face.
Another Time, This Same Moon
Another time, this same moon,
which free-hands its flat arc across
a fathomless slate of nighttime sky,
supplied so much duplicitous reason
that the warmest stretch ever of
endless kissing seemed also to signal
an endless love. Have others believed
in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire
and the jazz and the lips touching
just right? The palm of conversation
folding in whatever tender confidence
came to mind? No way, back then,
could that peaceful walk at dusk—
the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink
over a tiny inland lake—have led
to the sorry war to come, the saddest
set of regrets that still colors
my occasional wandering. How could
once watching waves etching a shore
have also meant the meanest goodbye
would eventually roll its own way in?
How could catching together
the brilliance of high light glancing
among bright white slopes have groomed
a final run so treacherous, so doomed? How
did such intimacy simply disappear
by the end of my life’s finest week?
Do you remember yours—remember
right now—this loveliness before rejection
recklessly re-bursts your re-built heart?
Early Morning Love Song
Despite the moon, nearly full, gliding
six inches above the western horizon
where that faint line of a Great Lake lies,
my couple of cardinals
amidst the etched gray of sunrise
say it’s morning,
and all the little birds believe them.
Despite me, nearing fifty, holding
two inches before hitting the midway
in a life as long as it ought to be,
my tired, allergic eyes
below a gray sketch of wild hair
see it’s morning,
and all the giddy cells believe them.
Despite this near-miss at late love, that the
last quarter-inch could not have slid down
like a pane shattering for joy,
my old sorrows roll over
in their fetching gray failure,
sigh, “It’s morning,”
and all the silly feelings believe them.
Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
A dingy ladybug just slammed
into this split-ended web of grass
as if shot from an organic cannon
for a miniature net. Nonplussed,
she has seemed to decide
to climb to its frizzy top
and fling herself,
to no applause whatsoever,
toward the sharp tip of a taller,
naked shaft nearby—
there, to re-form and sway
in the slightest breeze.
I say she has seemed because
I don’t know whose life it is,
anyway. It’s all about me,
of course: earlier,
I found myself atop
a mental mountain (you know,
surveying the lesser peaks?),
then flung myself for this poem,
fluttering into the snare
of choosing this or going with that
as if I determined all my decisions
all along the live-long day.
But I know me: soon enough
I’ll fold my wings
to re-form a spotted shell,
and it will seem I’ve decided
to head down that one long blade,
then, to no applause, up another.
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).
