Fern moods flicker within this rain’s haughty coven—
in its strange calls to sleep and mosquitos,
and to the thoughtless trillium—
and I’m playing No Regrets on my fingers
with an unbroken and forgetful studiousness.
(If whispers peg me a god’s monster, ah, well….)
This time I’m turning my face forward toward
the green volcanos building in the trees,
whose scheduled dimpled buds will duly jolt me.
We’re half a dozen months from apples again, which
doesn’t matter to the hot stars that trail their cold light, yawn,
dock beside the house—true and bored—unmistakenly—
in unquested silence. I’ll open my mind and trade out
their strung-up nonchalance for waterfalls of sunshine,
for clay pots of basil, cilantro, for bushelsful of the red fruit.
Originally published in Pif (August 2018)
Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, D. R. James lives, writes, veg-es, bird-watches, 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), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage