Autumn Poems - Part II
Autumn is the Season that Lies Down
The sun pours slow thick light aslant the garden,
buttering the royal red of marigolds.
It brings to mind good breakfasts. Pancakes
slightly creamy inside, sticky in the mouth.
The cirrus have returned and tease the heart
because the softness of their silk
against the blue is so impossible.
When in such silken robes, the lady angels
cross their legs and bend to morning coffee,
the tightened fabric outlines their hams.
You do not have a robe like that.
In the one you have, you do bend forward
to your coffee and the crossword. The smell
of toast is the smoky incense of the morning.
November 13, 2013
Presence and Absence
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
(They make a wilderness and call it peace.)
- Tacitus
As if an autumn forest writhed in a gale,
twigs and branches blurred and snapping,
where the traveling bird must find its roof
under its wing or entrust its ouces of flesh
to the spiraling air and mix to oblivion
with the blown, yellow leaves, and a pale sun
at last shines grayly, and the winds are gone,
and all is still without one sound, and birds
who lived walk upon the fallen trunks or dig
in the earthy masses of up-torn roots, just so
we woke to war and learned the bad news of
its unkind ways, and then a muddy desolation
when war reached the mere absence of its roar
and we called that peace and said, Good news?
September 2016
Autumn in Five Places
Autumn beats the sunny yolk of summer,
bends its vertical bright shafts slantwise.
In a Connecticut driveway, light through clouds
polishes the red beads among the bayberry's
trim leaves and coats the fruits of dark yews,
their syrup tightening their red skins to tension.
Gold light sideways spatters California eucalyptus,
lies lustrous on buckeye chestnuts brown as oiled wood.
Autumn makes velvet of the garnet petals
of marigolds on the dining room table.
Autumn once washed over the pure notebooks
of schoolkids. Once it lay on the pages
of young men reading Chaucer for the first time,
and changed his April into an October forever.
December 17, 2005
Man and Leaf
I. Me
An autumn tree of moderate size
with glistening wet, black trunk,
each branch divided, redivided,
to wet, black twigs, with pendant leaves,
sparse and shining red, red.
A wet and wooden cloud.
In my brain that wants a lovely lasting,
the tree takes the form of sculpture,
complex, metallic, in the air of a museum.
Yet, even such a masterpiece at length
would rust and crumble, just as now,
without stir of air and while I look,
a red leaf drops.
So the tree disrobes bit by bit,
becoming bare, obscure, and humble,
one tree among many, wintering,
till it puts on green again becoming
a different tree, not this one
that won my affction at a glance,
barely seen, then gone.
It might someday become a fossil,
every texture print in negative,
to be opened by my descendents hammer.
Yet, even then, among other fine collected rocks,
it will wear and blunt over time,
peeling, shedding dusty layers,
losing leaves and twigs.
II. Leaf
As a leaf, I jostled with my brothers
to look out on the world.
I gloried in my red and saw it all.
And, when I fell, a vision unexpected came:
The shiny silken tissue of the clouds.
I thought: I've seen the sky -- how beautiful! --
before I've closed my eyes.
December 17, 2005
