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.
—first published in I-70 Review
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 is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
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.
—first published in I-70 Review
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 is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
