Poems
by D. R.
James
Autumn in the Wings
Twigs’ lush medium is converting to
calligraphy, the dismissal of leaves
to launch its winter forewarning. Laden
with late acorns, squirrels chuck-chuck meaningless
memos, counter-balance full bellies, tails
unfurled. I am embracing—keepsaking—
the unscrolling calendar, harvesting
days tossed my way, the prodigious burden
of nows. Hunters will bruise this calm soon, but
until then it’s choirs of jays, cranes, and crows.
Second day of gun season,
and they’ve already bagged
some ninety-odd bucks.
A fine-looking local,
camo hat jaunty
over jostled blond hair, his
bolt-action Winchester coddled
between twin olive-green sleeves,
poses, grinning, on the front page—
a ten-pointer (if I know how
to count it right). Me,
I’ve posted warnings,
canceled all maneuvers,
withheld any and all furloughs,
mandated all my dears
close ranks at home-base
for the duration.
Leaf Fall
Asymmetric chandeliers instigate
their rhapsodic drop, the ruddling scumble-
trove of falling leaves and epiphanies
whose sillage shellacs paw, pelt, and breezes.
Trapezes sling these acrobatic hues
into bold arcs, risky spins, pronounced turns
before alights the wind-borne troupe of the
trees. Stippled bark akin to camo backs
the show, and cursive limbs announce the new
season: caesura ending summer’s song.
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 post-mortem
reach (though there it is again),
the delusion that autumn’s demise
warns us of anything. Those fears?
Fading—their threatening hues
mere harmless colors after all.
Instead, a dogwood’s scrawny pecs
spread stripped limbs to greet us
into the new season’s breach,
a wind-scrambled blueprint of
tangled twigs, leaf eddies, and rain.
What’s to come used to command
such aching concentration, demands
collected in the heart. Now, subdued,
it signals no sad story tracking itself
across some dismal arena dressed in
black, elegiac notes—but noodles muted
scales that free the blood and coast us
toward a more cordial space: a flip
requiem, perhaps, for chronic requiems.
Slackening Observed
A cardinal, its heaven’s sound, the winter’s
effervescent rag with salutating
gait. Notes etch, sun foils, and cathedralic
miles enlarge the whispering. To center
oneself, to murmur, to intercept the
synchronizing run that’s rioting, is
as longingly still as the slope outside
the city’s heaves, the barn-red-confetti’d
woods, the uniform crisp of autumn days,
shallows iced to the shoreline, valley’s dream.
