Walking the Beach, We Show Our Ignorance about Stars, Constellations by D. R. James

before mentioning the dead ones

mixed in,

the snuffed ones,

how they’ve guided the race, we figure,

since long before the faintest flicker

of a first-hand myth;

but dead, even then,

and now, this side of infinitude,

this side, let’s say, of

Gilgamesh, how

the discerning words

of the long gone

still illumine our forever

primitive way.

Bio

D.R. James, recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. He has published 3 full-length and 7 chapbook poetry collections, and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in many print and online anthologies and journals.

Author's note

For a couple of years after my divorce at the turn of the century I was the caretaker of an estate in Michigan along a good stretch of the Lake Michigan shore—while the owners migrated to Florida from September to June—and so experienced the beach and sky at all times of the day and year as if they were my own. That location, combined with my post-divorce melancholy, prompted all kinds of musings, including that which emerged in this poem. At the time I was also a writing and literature professor at a small college (from which I retired a year ago after 37 years) and frequently taught the great myths in my world literature classes. Being the earliest, Gilgamesh came to mind in relation to how infinitely old the starlight we were seeing had already been for those myth-makers. I'm fairly certain my situational depression engendered the bleak outlook for humanity that closes the poem.

This piece originally appeared in Since Everything Is All I've Got (2011), published by now-defunct March Street Press.