An orange sun descends like a slow-mo yo-yo toward where this Great Lake’s turned purple. I’d wanted it to sing back-up to a love song but as it dripped from its last slip of cloud like a tear from a bloody lid I knew meager romance was doomed. Nature— her two-faced refrain: one moment a hawk, of all things, startles, wings across your wondrous path and the next you’re can-canning around the carcass she was deconstructing. And as wave after unwavering wave unwinds its white loop of soothe the grinding motion’s undermining the stilts you snooze on. Snide circle of life, something about the conservation of all energy that enervates the grand delusion. Just as well: reality’s better, if bitter. Buttering you up with how no two sunsets… just leaves you greasy. It’s data: the more molecules, the more oranges, yellows, and reds. Especially the reds— their longest wavelengths, their blossoms like gruesome wounds, their crimson dreams aboard the steady surf that sings me to sleep. *first published in If god were gentle (Dos Madres, 2017)
About the Poet:
D. R. James’s latest of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project. He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan.
Ephemeral Elegies 
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