75 Autumn poems

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. I praise the fall: it is the human season. Now No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth, Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth, Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough, But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone: There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes. Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves. It is the human season. On this sterile air Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on. I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone. I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly. This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep. But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room. You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.

There’s a farm auction up the road. Wind has its bid in for the leaves. Already bugs flurry the headlights between cornfields at night. If this world were permanent, I could dance full as the squaw dress on the clothesline. I would not see winter in the square of white yard-light on the wall. But something tugs at me. The world is at a loss and I am part of it migrating daily. Everything is up for grabs like a box of farm tools broken open. I hear the spirits often in the garden and along the shore of corn. I know this place is not mine. I hear them up the road again. This world is a horizon, an open sea. Behind the house, the white iceberg of the barn.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider. One is a dock you walk out on, the other the spine of a thin swimming horse and the river each day a full measure colder. A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover. Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet, rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser by color. That’s autumn heat: her hand placing silver buckles with silver, gold buckles with gold, setting each on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty, and calling it pleasure.

In the month of the long decline of roses I, beholding the summer dead before me, Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent, Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions Half divided the eyelids of the sunset; Till I heard as it were a noise of waters Moving tremulous under feet of angels Multitudinous, out of all the heavens; Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage, Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow; And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels, Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight, Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel, Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not, Winds not born in the north nor any quarter, Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine; Heard between them a voice of exultation, "Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded, Even like as a leaf the year is withered, All the fruits of the day from all her branches Gathered, neither is any left to gather. All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms, All are taken away; the season wasted, Like an ember among the fallen ashes. Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight, Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost, We bring flowers that fade not after autumn, Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons, Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser), Woven under the eyes of stars and planets When low light was upon the windy reaches Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows And green fields of the sea that make no pasture: Since the winter begins, the weeping winter, All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever."

October and the rain is warm the light moving across the water’s surface is there and not there like a voice you remember say your mother’s youthful as once she was on a day like this embracing the sunshine breaking through or watching it trace between her fingertips so real you can almost believe again in the silence between you, her breath on your cheek while you lay ill in bed and in only a moment a bell is ringing or your father is singing in the kitchen about strangers and without even an echo or the echo of an echo all of this is gone and we’re walking again to the Hellfire Club or the Sugar Loaf, it’s Sunday there’s not much traffic, and on the hills as you run twigs, and small black pellets are vanishing beneath your feet

Crows, crows, crows, crows then the slow flapaway over the hill and the dead oak is naked

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.

the rooms are chosen, then they move on the beads are wetted in the lime the weedlot boils in the blood of one eye the children first are cankered then they spin there are not routes, only dials the rocks are spun together in one ball the laundry is of rust, the pillow shrieks pianos all blow northward and return must be a bath if  I could find it is a map of all the ways that center intermission skulls are simply caps for all compression day’s light raising closets for its dark I put up the clothes and trail the keys that onyx knob in vacuum turns the train pressure on the pitches swaying back again a world without a heartbeat but it stays

The length o’ days ageän do shrink An’ flowers be thin in meäd, among The eegrass a-sheenèn bright, along Brook upon brook, an’ brink by brink. Noo starlèns do rise in vlock on wing— Noo goocoo in nest-green leaves do sound— Noo swallows be now a-wheelèn round— Dip after dip, an’ swing by swing. The wheat that did leätely rustle thick Is now up in mows that still be new, An’ yollow bevore the sky o’ blue— Tip after tip, an’ rick by rick. While now I can walk a dusty mile I’ll teäke me a day, while days be clear, To vind a vew friends that still be dear, Feäce after feäce, an’ smile by smile.