SurVision Magazine

Wedged, Continued

After a surreal photo-graphic by Bryan DeLae


Some days I even dare to face
whether the (un)(re)stored fortress of language
that bears up my own subtle house of doubts
is surfacing or sinking
and whether my sentience is like a band of seekers
crossing then walking its idyllic beach
drawn by the free music of wind and surf
or like exiles-like-mice left to roast
in its thick wilderness of land-locked dunes,
the sky scraping and thriving overhead, bordering
on ash no matter dawn or attitudinal dusk,
no matter the cringe of sun hung low, its scrimmed rise or fall.
Other times, the hours
like shifting sands penetrating or escaping a weathered perimeter
flood with the cowed wonder of what might lie beyond:
dark cliffs, remnants eaten away from a tilted world,
mythic stones stood and held on edge,
a remote ocean boiling away its underwater flora and fauna.
Or just maybe mind's way one day
will move easily like wheels over a hard but ebbing frost,
eventually barreling down the clean slopes
with the look and smell of lucidity borne of speed –
but all caught still
in the taut ebullience of sapient insufficiency.





D. R. James lives in the woods outside Saugatuck, Michigan. He has taught college writing, literature for 34 years. His work appears in various journals and anthologies. His latest of seven poetry collections is If god were gentle from Dos Madres Press (2017), his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free and downloadable-for-the-folding at Origami Poems Project, and his new chapbook Surreal Expulsion will be released in spring 2019 by The Poetry Box.