James Robert Atlas (March 22, 1949 – September 4, 2019) was a writer, and publisher. He was the president of Atlas & Company and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.
THE WAY OF ALL LOSS
James Atlas
For Margaret
All that someone has wished or understood
is the fuel to the holocaust of our lives. –John Berryman
Breathing in the thicket of your thin, tossed hair
I would hear our voices like distant seas
break vaguely upon. the walking room where
suspended, tentative, ill-at-ease,
we floated above our awkward bed
like tight-lipped angels on the Sistine
celling. Listless the garreted
shelter of your arms, nineteen,
apologetic for having made apologies,
I winced like a patient being hollowed by disease.
What course insistence there is to lust!
If what I know i, just the hoarse
reply of skin becoming brittle crust,
the guilt of love become remorse,
l would have understood before the fragile causes
of our doubt. Driving through Maine,
I listened for music in the manic, weeping rain,
and imagined I saw Moses
in each swaying stalk of wheat, each sighing stone.
We learn by loving that we !ive alone. Now I loiter through the= in dim
museums, startled by what I am,
or ride the subways every afternoon,
my arm drawn to the window, poised like a harpoon.