Atop Mt. Harvard, May 1976
with a Line from Major Jackson
written by: D.R. James
“You must ascend a mountain to learn
your relation to matter.”
—Henry David Thoreau
The summit staged a glimpse. The West became
a canvas. When I’m dispersed, it draws back.
That chalked terrain: peaks pleated, engraved, cocked-
pinched infinity, fabric embroidered
with the white flares of lingering snowpack.
I thought, how else might I conjure heaven?
My mind’s museumed, hammered facts, haloed
proofs, disturbed forever. Imagine them
clenching fists at infringement. They’d had god’s
licensed niche, and the jig was all but up.
D. R. James, recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, bird-watches, 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
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