I flinch then I drift into reverie…
wing-swept and flake-wept to swooping footpaths
past a curved door’s stoop, rapt in a gashed globe
that’s ascending, descending, clutched embrace:
alarmed commuter, reconstituted
deserter, survivor of unveiling.
What other to do but hover then plunge,
lunge then stall? When you’re small, mote-sloughed, speck-hid
like a splinter, squad-shirked, dislodged, slivered,
every current re-collects, returns you.
Originally published in Enclave (of Entropy Magazine) (April 30, 2020)
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.