75 Autumn poems

I It’s odd to have a separate month. It escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The Indians have a name for it, they call it: “Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters at dawn. Everything is special to them, the colorful ones. II Somehow the housewife does not seem gentle. Is she angry because her husband likes October? Is it snow bleeds softly from her shoes? The nest eggs have captured her, but April rises from her bed. III “The beggars are upon us!” cried Chester. Three strangers appeared at the door, demanding ribbons. The October wind . . . nests IV Why do I think October is beautiful? It is not, is not beautiful. But then what is there to hold one’s interest between the various drifts of a day’s work, but to search out the differences the window and grate— but it is not, is not beautiful. V I think your face is beautiful, the way it is close to my face, and I think you are the real October with your transparence and the stone of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.

I used to think the land had something to say to us, back when wildflowers would come right up to your hand as if they were tame. Sooner or later, I thought, the wind would begin to make sense if I listened hard and took notes religiously. That was spring. Now I’m not so sure: the cloudless sky has a flat affect and the fields plowed down after harvest seem so expressionless, keeping their own counsel. This afternoon, nut tree leaves blow across them as if autumn had written us a long letter, changed its mind, and tore it into little scraps.

I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed. I watch the woods for deer who never come. I know the hes and shes in autumn rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work so I may let the crows in corn believe it’s me their caws are meant to warn, and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves they know me too. They know the boy who lives inside me still won’t go away. The deer are ghosts who slip between the light through trees, so you may only hear the snap of branches in the thicket beyond hope. I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.

All afternoon his tractor pulls a flat wagon with bales to the barn, then back to the waiting chopped field. It trails a feather of smoke. Down the block we bend with the season: shoes to polish for a big game, storm windows to batten or patch. And how like a field is the whole sky now that the maples have shed their leaves, too. It makes us believers—stationed in groups, leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone, bagging gold for the cold days to come.

Mild is the parting year, and sweet The odour of the falling spray; Life passes on more rudely fleet, And balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom, But mourn that never must there fall Or on my breast or on my tomb The tear that would have soothed it all.

The morns are meeker than they were - The nuts are getting brown - The berry’s cheek is plumper - The rose is out of town. The maple wears a gayer scarf - The field a scarlet gown - Lest I sh'd be old-fashioned I’ll put a trinket on.

The rake is like a wand or fan, With bamboo springing in a span To catch the leaves that I amass In bushels on the evening grass. I reckon how the wind behaves And rake them lightly into waves And rake the waves upon a pile, Then stop my raking for a while. The sun is down, the air is blue, And soon the fingers will be, too, But there are children to appease With ducking in those leafy seas. So loudly rummaging their bed On the dry billows of the dead, They are not warned at four and three Of natural mortality. Before their supper they require A dragon field of yellow fire To light and toast them in the gloom. So much for old earth’s ashen doom.

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes: some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost it glittered like a dime. The autumn boughs and blackened branches wore a somber gloss that whispered tails to me, not heads. I read memorial columns in their trunks; their leaves spelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head . . . in penny profile, Lincoln-like (one sleeve, one eye) but even it was turning tails as russet leaves lay spent across the trails.

Here I am saying “The leaves are falling” —one of those choruses that vie with interminable verses to mock hoarders. Yeah, we get that a palette of winds is a pretty thing: one blurs the anther, another the river splurging on riprap, expunging phosphates, out of the temperature differential building sculptural fogs that promenade between shores a glacier wedged ajar, a fjord. Whatever gives the river its seriousness reverses in the light of those clouds moving as if absorbing their pomp in advance of it— characters which untied the painter and took the sculls again.

A gust roused the waves, leaves blew into the water, the waves were ash-gray, the sky tin-gray, ash-gray the autumn. It was good for my heart: there my feelings were ash-gray, the sky tin-gray, ash-gray the autumn. The breath of wind brought cooler air, the waves of mourning brought separation: autumn and autumn befriend each other.