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.
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 dunescape were shifting vaguely
on her divan, merely relieving a dreamy ache
in the contours of her hips and thighs.
.
BIO: D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. Recently retired from college teaching, James lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
