(August 3, 1937 – December 14, 2020)
—Live as if you were already dead. (Zen admonition)
He has crossed his ocean, popped up in his new land.
The dead man/not dead man mocks commemoration.
Angels sling his praises through creation’s keyhole.
But he is already vibrating exponentially.
He is already transmitting arpeggios.
His mother’s sigh and his father’s ladder had diminished.
On a roll, he’d proffer poetic emanations.
Poems’ emanations indicate he’s on a roll.
Learned and broken rules made of him a monument.
Undermining monuments is his only rule.

D. R. James, a year-plus 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.