Another Time, This Same Moon - D. R. James
- HOW Blog
- Nov 7, 2023
- 1 min read
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?
D. R. James, a year+ into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, 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
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