Forty-Six
When I was forty-six I perched for hours
above a great lake, the newly thawed
springtime breakers, and watched
the frantic gulls scrambling,
how they wrangled crazily,
their pale orange feet scuttling under them,
aimlessly up and around the shore line, fifteen
or twenty of them, and suddenly two
would startle together and flap
one another beak-and-wing to beak-and-wing
the way we did, vicious and rigorous, and then
just as suddenly
let up and strut away
righteous, unfazed,
on the cold sand that was their world
and for a while was mine.
—after Hayden Carruth
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