Imagine the graphable shifts in your own self-civilization from proud, young hunter to calculating gatherer to steady cultivator: industrious over worker of your fragile inner child. And notice those thin but alarming layers in your sedimentary record, the relative moments indicating odd breakthroughs, beneficial mutations, weathered disasters— in my case, that sudden thaw of marital ice, the one that displaced my psychic shoreline inland hundreds of miles, submerging remnants of a domestication I’d survived in ignorant and therefore precarious peace. Any trained observer could write up the reports, even poems on the highlights. Why, I can recount all kinds of particular days like geological calamities: when my grandfather died and his wrist watch stopped on the minute he hung his screaming arm over the gunwale at the Red Umbrella Inn; the first time I got drunk, so sick on a buddy’s dad’s secreted liquor I thought my life would spin forever out of control; my wedding when I served the wine, played crazy blues harmonica and scatted us on our merry married way; the divorce. So why, you may now want to know, can’t I recall the eons in between, those thick, bland strata, those uniformly-striped piles of years on years when nothing noteworthy seems to have happened but wherein must have developed the insidious disintegrations, and wherein I must have lived over twenty thousand of my give-or-take twenty thousand five hundred days?
About the Poet:
D. R. James, a year+ into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, bird-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 
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