D. R. James, a year into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, bird-watches, 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.
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

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.

Good to Know It Could Be Sunny

The lake some days goes calm,
no longer rolling against the shore but
undulating the way you’d picture
sheets spreading and smoothed,
slow motion, a mother or a lover
gently raising and lowering
the broad cloth, catching the air
to square that expanse with the bed.

Just so.

And such thoughts come
when the bed has warmed only
to your restless presence,
a few blank dreams
you would have gladly lived.

Then the lone smell on pillows
tells you to do laundry,
to pay bills,
to water plants,
to consider stringing some lines.

Forty – maybe eighty? – feet out
a gull levels west, clear,
it would seem, to the horizon,
and then the lake planes
south, tips east, catches fleeting pink
across its ashen wings.

Let It Go, Buddha

Let it go, Buddha
keeps telling me, still so
attached to detachment
that veins I imagine
at his temples throb
like the chanting
of ancestors on a CD
I bought cheap for $7.97.
For once again I’ve had
the wrong idea: Calvi-
tholicism’s indissoluble
oil slick floating on
Buddha’s smooth sea
of equanimity. Try
as I might – and, well,
there it is, attached at
the straining hip of effort.
Zen Master Seung Sahn says
wanting enlightenment’s
a big mistake. I say
add it to the list:
the first marriage,
the first religion,
the second – trying
to save the whole world
with words.