75 Autumn poems

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon. Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees. Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage, While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage And gone to shiver in their winter clusters. Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin, Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters. Even the swarms of kids have given in To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure: TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains. The days throw up a closed sign around four. The hapless customer who'd wanted something Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

I am standing outside in Minnesota ghost wind recalling names in winter mist The road smells of dogs two days dead White photographers talk in the house of mainstream media I can’t articulate the agony of Eagle Singer’s children to them. We celebrate the old man while another generation shoots crushed and heated prescriptions sells baskets, machinery, the fixtures yet to be installed in the house, yet to be heated by the tribal government, for another night stolen by the stupors and the wondrous pleasure of forget everything medicines. Back inside Uncle Two Dogs rolls me a smoke out of organic American Spirit I look to a last cup of coffee. The way home fills with snow our tracks human and machine.

Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield. No dice. We stack twigs for burning in glistening patches but the rain won’t give. So we wait, breeding mood, making music of decline. We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving. We ache in secret, memorizing a gloomy line or two of German. When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, wind, with your cargo of zithers! November 1981

So this is aging: the bare sun, skinned, palely bucking the dark wind, slides through the glass, crawls on the carpet, climbs the footboard, lies crosswise on the blanket, a spoiled dog waiting to be fed. Not now, dear warmth. The kindling’s in the shed, too far to fetch. Those two great logs that close together to make fire, repose apart, an old couple reminiscing on conflagrations they’re now missing: how every sunny Saturday afternoon, Hey, diddle-diddle, the dish ran away with the spoon. Not yet, dear spoon. Some hotter day, dear dish. No tidbits now. Instead, let’s make a wish, and boil fresh water for the small teapot to keep it piping hot.

Listen. . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.

when all the golden birds fly home across the blue deep water; On shore I sit rapt in its scattering glitter; departure rustles through the trees. This farewell is vast and separation draws close, but reunion, that also is certain. My head on my arm I fall asleep easily. On my eyes a mother’s breath, from her mouth to my heart: sleep, child, and dream now the sun is gone.—

O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away. Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, Whose clustered fruit must else be lost— For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

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 gray cloud twirls, widens, while white rips multiply on the water far out. Wet tousled yellow leaves, thick on the slate terrace. The jay’s hoarse cry. He’s stumbling in the air, too soaked to fly. 2 Knuckles of the rain on the roof, chuckles into the drain- pipe, spatters on the leaves that litter the grass. Melancholy morning, the tide full in the bay, an overflowing bowl. At least, no wind, no roughness in the sky, its gray face bedraggled by its tears. 3 Peeling a pear, I remember my daddy’s hand. His thumb (the one that got nipped by the saw, lacked a nail) fit into the cored hollow of the slippery half his knife skinned so neatly. Dad would pare the fruit from our orchard in the fall, while Mother boiled the jars, prepared for “putting up.” Dad used to darn our socks when we were small, and cut our hair and toenails. Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d take turns in his lap. He’d help bathe us sometimes. Dad could do anything. He built our dining table, chairs, the buffet, the bay window seat, my little desk of cherry wood where I wrote my first poems. That day at the shop, splitting panel boards on the electric saw (oh, I can hear the screech of it now, the whirling blade that sliced my daddy’s thumb), he received the mar that, long after, in his coffin, distinguished his skilled hand. 4 I sit with braided fingers and closed eyes in a span of late sunlight. The spokes are closing. It is fall: warm milk of light, though from an aging breast. I do not mean to pray. The posture for thanks or supplication is the same as for weariness or relief. But I am glad for the luck of light. Surely it is godly, that it makes all things begin, and appear, and become actual to each other. Light that’s sucked into the eye, warming the brain with wires of color. Light that hatched life out of the cold egg of earth. 5 Dark wild honey, the lion’s eye color, you brought home from a country store. Tastes of the work of shaggy bees on strong weeds, their midsummer bloom. My brain’s electric circuit glows, like the lion’s iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move. Thick transparent amber you brought home, the sweet that burns. 6 “The very hairs of your head are numbered,” said the words in my head, as the haircutter snipped and cut, my round head a newel poked out of the tent top’s slippery sheet, while my hairs’ straight rays rained down, making pattern on the neat vacant cosmos of my lap. And maybe it was those tiny flies, phantoms of my aging eyes, seen out of the sides floating (that, when you turn to find them full face, always dissolve) but I saw, I think, minuscule, marked in clearest ink, Hairs #9001 and #9002 fall, the cut-off ends streaking little comets, till they tumbled to confuse with all the others in their fizzled heaps, in canyons of my lap. And what keeps asking in my head now that, brushed off and finished, I’m walking in the street, is how can those numbers remain all the way through, and all along the length of every hair, and even before each one is grown, apparently, through my scalp? For, if the hairs of my head are numbered, it means no more and no less of them have ever, or will ever be. In my head, now cool and light, thoughts, phantom white flies, take a fling: This discovery can apply to everything. 7 Now and then, a red leaf riding the slow flow of gray water. From the bridge, see far into the woods, now that limbs are bare, ground thick-littered. See, along the scarcely gliding stream, the blanched, diminished, ragged swamp and woods the sun still spills into. Stand still, stare hard into bramble and tangle, past leaning broken trunks, sprawled roots exposed. Will something move?—some vision come to outline? Yes, there— deep in—a dark bird hangs in the thicket, stretches a wing. Reversing his perch, he says one “Chuck.” His shoulder-patch that should be red looks gray. This old redwing has decided to stay, this year, not join the strenuous migration. Better here, in the familiar, to fade.

October is when night guzzles up the orange sherbet sunset and sends the day to bed before supper and October is when jack-o’-lanterns grin in the darkness and strange company crunches across the rumple of dry leaves to ring a doorbell. October is when you can be ghost, a witch, a creature from outer space… almost anything! And the neighbors, fearing tricks, give you treats.

Although a tide turns in the trees the moon doesn't turn the leaves, though chimneys smoke and blue concedes to bluer home-time dark. Though restless leaves submerge the park in yellow shallows, ankle-deep, and through each tree the moon shows, halved or quartered or complete, the moon's no fruit and has no seed, and turns no tide of leaves on paths that still persist but do not lead where they did before dark. Although the moonstruck pond stares hard the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe. Each mind's a different, distant world this same moon will not leave.