"Recycling" and "Great Blue Heron"
Two poems by D. R. James
Recycling
When Dad had his easy operation
he quit smoking, cold turkey,
and Peggy and I traced and crayoned
the encyclopedia’s glossy plates.
I gave him a cardinal, a goldfinch,
a blue jay and still know those basic colors,
their cocked depictions. Today, near
blind, he’s ready to hand over whatever
can’t be moved—some ’20s textbooks,
Grandpa’s elaborate camera, the table saw
that hasn’t cut much in years and years.
And, newly single, I’m trying to feel sad
about now but grope toward another
notion instead: I should settle again,
start collecting for sons who, in another
thirty-five years, will need to help
clear out a house, haul away quaint
power tools, Mom’s inlaid table, old
floor lamps, a love seat, a junk box
of dusty cup hooks and nails, and
several odd poems featuring birds.
—first published in Oberon
Great Blue Heron Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it. —Mary Oliver, “October” Busy inhabiting my world— blazing car, radio blather, coffee buzz that wouldn’t last— I somehow caught a left-hand glimpse, so quick I didn’t see you flinch, yet so outstanding, you could’ve been a plastic cousin to the prank flamingos that another morning enthralled my neighbor’s lawn. Stark still, ankle-deep in that transitory water, only the one side, one-eyed, wide as disbelief, you looked just like you looked, posed in the Natural History Museum, 1963: for again, all those slender angles, the spear of your bill, that deathless intensity marking your stick-form way, only now in a mid-May puddle poised between the intersecting rushes eastbound, 196, southbound, 31. And you, still doing what you’ve never known you do, still finding your life wherever you find yourself— Great Blue Heron, cont’d. while I, still fixated as always on finding myself, as if that were to find a life, saw again how wildly I am alive— how I always want to know it. —first published in Ruminate
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