If god were gentle
Let us believe in a strong god,
who makes the oceans
roar and the wind crack about our ears…
For we are envious of this, and to
believe in a gentle god,
therefore, does not become us.
—John Haines, “Pictures and Parables, IV”
But if god were gentle,
here’s what would become us:
bluest sky, the sun-warmed porch, both
beholding a glorious afternoon;
a couple of hummers buzzing
one another and synthetic flowers strung
from the eaves of drowsy cottages
in their staggered, settled rows;
patches of heat, patches of swifter cool,
gulls and butterflies riding
the easy overlap; the oblivious bees
busiest among the wine-red geraniums;
the breeze-borne pine;
the near swish along a length of shore.
This perfect day—
and then a doze, a little more
of sailing the muddling resubmergence
into all of a life that’s come before—
a convergence too complex
to register, though no less corporeal
for its mysteries, for its streams,
for its coursing through the
unwished, the essential, sorrows.
When the Water and Sand Dance
When the water and sand dance, whence (whence?)
their music? What is that music? What sense, what
composition surfs itself in? Yes, the water—its
bazillion droplets, the mini-jetsam line it etches.
Yes, the sand—its gazillion granules, the sponging
gauze-and-muslin of them. But what but mind
imagines there’s music? Perhaps the end of your
century also hauled along its ton of sadness
as did mine. And perhaps the years have
finally worn it down to barely nothing of your
day-to-day. The sun and shadows play
again their fetching fine effects. The moon
and birds and even dying leaves relieve
your smallest residue of gloom. But
mind—must it remember anyway? And
is it therefore grateful, more than
happy in that moment, to cue its
private music, then tune your needy
ear to every measure when
the water and the sand dance?
True North
The lone crow on the lone pole
where the weathervane used to whirl
insinuates my need for misdirection.
He is an arrow of skittish attention,
of scant intention: the cock and hop,
the flick and caw toward anything
on the wind. Now angling east, now
south by southwest, he designates
with beak then disagreeing tail feathers,
with a lean-to and a shoulder scrunch,
with an attitude from his beady black eye—
as if he were ever the one to judge.
And once he’s spun like a pin on a binnacle
past all points of some madcap inner compass—
once the summer clouds have bowed to push on
and the grasses have waved their gratefulness—
he unfurls the shifty sails of his wings,
and the breeze relieves him of his post.
—first published in Town Creek Poetry (Fall 2014)
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D.R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are MobiusTrip and Flip Requiem(Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his work has appeared internationally in a wide variety of anthologies and journals.
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