Another time, this same moon, which free-hands its flat arc across a fathomless slate of nighttime sky, supplied so much duplicitous reason that the warmest stretch ever of endless kissing seemed also to signal an endless love. Have others believed in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire and the jazz and the lips touching just right? The palm of conversation folding in whatever tender confidence came to mind? No way, back then, could that peaceful walk at dusk— the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink over a tiny inland lake—have led to the sorry war to come, the saddest set of regrets that still colors my occasional wandering. How could once watching waves etching a shore have also meant the meanest goodbye would eventually roll its own way in? How could catching together the brilliance of high light glancing among bright white slopes have groomed a final run so treacherous, so doomed? How did such intimacy simply disappear by the end of my life’s finest week? Do you remember yours—remember right now—this loveliness before rejection recklessly re-bursts your re-built heart?
About the Poet:
Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, D. R. James lives, writes, critter-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
Ephemeral Elegies 
Reblogged this on penwithlit and commented:
The time scale here appears to be just a week but might be left more vague and therefore more universal. Some lovely imagery..
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