D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching university writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, USA. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021).

Mallards, Mounted on a Chimney Wall

I’ve a vague idea how they ended up
these two hundred lovely feet from shore,
this side of the tall double panes, veering
over the owners’ photos propped on a mantle,
over an old golden retriever twitching now
on his sheepskin rug. So I doubt it was due
to the wrenching updraft depicted
in their implausible contortions, the bunched
shoulders of their posed wings.
As mild chili simmers and Mozart saws
an easy soundtrack, they strive flat
against fine brick, forever matching
their sapphire chevrons, the shriveled orange
leaves of their feet. Meanwhile,
the drake’s clamped beak and his
wild dark eye seem to be carving
today’s northwest wind as if to permit
his trailing hen her subtle luxury
of squinting—as if, in wrestling her fixed
pin of fate, she entertains the greatest questions:
Why are we here? Where are we going?
Will we ever arrive? And, in a far softer thought
that has me perched on this hearthside chair,
my ear tiptoed to her dusty brain:

Why does it have to be me?

Walking the Beach, We Show Our Ignorance about Stars, Constellations

before mentioning the dead ones
mixed in,
the snuffed ones,
how they’ve guided the race, we figure,
since long before the faintest flicker
of a first-hand myth;
but dead, even then,
and now, this side of infinitude,
this side, let’s say, of
Gilgamesh, how
the discerning words
of the long gone
still illumine our forever

primitive way.

How the Fog Can Matter

Mid-day, a slightest shivering mist
but still the sun
staring over your shoulder,
those wisps stealing
across peripheral fields
like several clever students late for class.
The professor with the leathery lips
perched in the cottonwood
that commands the nearby hillside
blows his smoke
to remind you of all those
variously true theologies.
A cedar-sided shack
two hundred yards beyond the rusted yew
comes and goes, now sharp, now
fading, floating
among the dunes, on grass
and breeze, perpetually
tipping its shabby hat, polite
and stiffened to stretches of sand,
to the breakers barely emerging
from the fog.
And whether you sit here making
something of this or not—
whether you care or not—
it appears you’ve cared,

and there it is.

Bon Voyage!

Life is like stepping onto a boat which is
about to sail out to sea and sink.
—Shunryu Suzuki
Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself,
if at all, only at its end on the verge of death?
                 —Viktor Frankl
Does Soto Zen ever mention you can’t cancel,
can’t rebook for a better week, another season,
or due to limbo, your marriage gone to hell?
Life’s cruise is now and not never. Oh, sure,
you could leap, even double somersault over
the side, work your manic cannonball act,
that full-tuck drop from the poop deck.
Camus, for one, existentially questioned
why anyone wouldn’t have already executed
that particular kind of a final dive.
Perhaps he’d not considered the sinking. Or,
considered it and concluded, “Who can abide
that anticlimax?” But even he stayed
aboard, the festivities apparently far too
fetching: his father killed in the Marne,
his uncle paralyzed, his TB, the colonial thumb
pressing his Algerian brothers while Nazis
oppressed his entire world, his Nobel
that should have gone to Malraux—the wreck
at 46, his own too early disembarkation. No,
Camus knew what the roshi knows: this plague
of sinking, the bleak catalyst for the celebration 
en route. Why else such great devotion, 
Le Théâtre du Travail, two dozen volumes written
for la fraternité, and all before this middle age 
at which I write? Older, he might have counseled
Viktor’s trick, too, like plugging your dear life
as an unfinished film: millions of tiny images, 
stowing their successive meanings until
the credits roll, the low rows of deck lights
ignite, and you bow, the whole exposed cargo

only now rewound as your celluloid soul.

Resignation

When I suddenly knew to look up
and away, to let new foundations
float for fundamentals, I could see
that if the swallowtail’s paper force
could slice upwind along a dancing lake,
and if it carried on, carrying on, content—
then the syllogism could hold me, too:
our sentence looms lighter than air.
Now, when long grasses shimmer
in the clearest light, I imagine as much
among the roots, their loving work
of hugging dune snugged to shore,
of fingering it into woods—until
that assignation should change,
another shape configured, as if
the landscape were shifting vaguely
on her divan to relieve a dreamy ache
in the contours of her hips and thighs.