Tag Archives: D. R. James

Wan Sun, No Snow

Mere tufts of snow now dot the downed leaves, gleaming like wide mushrooms. Incredible how quickly that total blanketing soaked into extinction. In this most welcome splash of light nothing seems to mourn: the bleak yard, the splayed twigs on … Continue reading

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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— … Continue reading

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True North

The lone crow on the lone pole where the weathervane used to whirl insinuates my need for misdirection. He is an arrow of skittish attention, of scant intention: the cock and hop, the flick and caw toward anything on the … Continue reading

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Same Old Same Old

Three teen deer have begun of late to make daily dusk-time stops out back, their flat flanks and thick, angled necks depicting stumps and trunks that then move and materialize and re-blend as their busy muzzles forage-and- freeze them across … Continue reading

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Catalog of a Recovery

It’s come down to hints: clandestine signs in the woods, vacuumed leaves hustling to cover his rearview trail, the pronated footprints of pipers along the beach, driftwood twisted like something he might know. His heart aches less. An Italian tablecloth … Continue reading

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Airport Relativity

First person and present tense must strike you as odd— how I could both greet and record your emergence from this crowd of funneled souls, recount details that never occurred, at least not regarding your arriving at 4:10, then 5:25, … Continue reading

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Flip Requiem

Only black-and-tan clumps cling anymore to our oaks (raking finally making sense), which stand silent as pickets this side of winter’s no-longer fierce or precise approach. I’m over a father’s death, an angry mother’s postmortem reach (though there it is … Continue reading

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Recycling

When Dad had his easy operation he quit smoking, cold turkey, and Peggy and I traced and crayoned the encyclopedia’s glossy plates. I gave him a cardinal, a goldfinch, a blue jay and still know those basic colors, their cocked … Continue reading

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Contrails

            —after a photograph by Colleen MacLaughlin One answer lies in the tropospheric molecules scattering short blue waves and vapor meeting minus-sixty. But what’s the burning question? What orders the eye, the brain, to catch all the colors after rain? What … Continue reading

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