Fall

If for a day joy masters me,
Think not my wounds are healed;
Far deeper than the scars you see,
I keep the roots concealed.

They shall bear blossoms with the fall;
I have their word for this,
Who tend my roots with rains of gall,
And...

And the light, a wakened heyday of air
Tuned low and clear and wide,
A radiance now that would emblaze
And veil the most golden horn
Or any entering of a sudden clearing
To a standing, astonished, revealed . . .

That the actual streets I...

A week of autumn snow, and today the sun,
the buildings fizzy with melting, the beggar
draping his sheets over the bank's homeless-spikes.

My daughter runs under the sycamore trees,
shouts look it’s still snowing, it’s still snowing,
clumps of old snow falling around her.

Who...

I await the end of August and the murder of September.
I am here, tardy Autumn, waiting for you. I’ve prepared you a wheat porridge and lit a fire. Come with your wind and sweep away the shameless sun. Lift its...

Our voices press
from us
and twine
around the year's
fermenting wine

Yellow fall roars
Over the ground.
Loud, in the leafy sun that pours
Liquid through doors,
Yellow, the leaves twist down


as the winding
of the vine
pulls our curling
voices—

Glowing in wind and change,
The orange leaf tells

How one more season...

1

A smudge for the horizon
that, on a clear day, shows
the hard edge of hills and
buildings on the other coast.
Anchored boats all head one way:
north, where the wind comes from.
You can see the storm inflating
out of the west. A dark hole
in...

and the garden diminishes: cucumber leaves rumpled
and rusty, zucchini felled by borers, tomatoes sparse
on the vines. But out in the perennial beds, there’s one last
blast of color: ignitions of goldenrod, flamboyant
asters, spiraling mums, all those flashy spikes waving
in the...

Sober for once, for what—
for the words to budge. 

We spent summer propped up
by each other's stuttering.

There are seasons here
if you squint. And there's

relief in the landscape's
sloughed off cusps of color

fallen over the familiar 
landmarks, the familiar

trash—things that last. 

fallen leaves
the abbot sweeps
around them 

It’s now within
an hour of sundown of a late
November afternoon.

It was a beautiful day,
the cold burned
down any indignation.

What won’t degrade:
the sick and distant, or near and black,
bad-natured tides of want.

Jean Rhys is saying
If  I could jump out of the window
one...

I saw this day coming         class would end       and it would be night
            time to attach         bike lights               tonight I lit my way
with a cigarette                   
                    I asked if petticoat ding a ling         was a fun bar
NO...

Now you want me to tell you
a history of fish
while the lake clouds over?
But don’t you see
how thirst beats in the throat
of the lizards on the crushed leaves?
On the ground
autumn’s dead hedgehogs
have plunged through the periwinkles.
And you chew
the parched stalks:
already...

         Today the moon sees fit to come between a parched earth
    and sun, hurrying the premature darkness. A rooster in the yard
            cuts off its crowing, fooled into momentary sleep.
               And soon the Perseid showers, broken...

From up here in the leaves’ no-kidding goldishness
you’d guess everyone was already in lovely w/ each
others’ cheekbones. Infinity scarves
& vanilla coffee, mint tea, warm whatever.
Cozy becoming the coming-at-the-seams, a couplet
of verbs mid-bodily inexperience.
That man doing cartwheels is not wearing a...

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.
 
He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.
 
Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,
 
When the wind stops and,...

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
 
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
 
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
 
I may load and...

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:
And that not dwelt in now by...

                                  i
         The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of...

     AUTUMN

gold of amber
red of ember
brown of umber
all September
 
     MCCOY CREEK
 
Over the bright shallows
now no flights of swallows.
Leaves of the sheltering willow
dangle thin and yellow.
 
     OCTOBER
 
At four in the morning the west wind
moved in the leaves of...