75 Autumn poems

November 1915 Today, as I rode by, I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree

Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard. Light drives lower and one bluejay crams our cold memories out past the sun, each time your traces come past the shadows and visit under my looking-glass fingers that lift and block out the sun. Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn, and you can trace your last homecoming into the snow or the sun.

When summer ended the leaves of snapdragons withered taking their shrill-colored mouths with them. They were still, so quiet. They were violet where umber now is. She hated and she hated to see them go. Flowers born when the weather was good - this she thinks of, watching the branch of peaches daring their ways above the fence, and further, two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other, arcing their bodies in grim determination to find what is good, what is given them to find. These are warriors distancing themselves from history. They find peace in the way they contain the wind and are gone.

It is the dark of the moon. Late at night, the end of summer, The autumn constellations Glow in the arid heaven. The air smells of cattle, hay, And dust. In the old orchard The pears are ripe. The trees Have sprouted from old rootstocks And the fruit is inedible. As I pass them I hear something Rustling and grunting and turn My light into the branches. Two raccoons with acrid pear Juice and saliva drooling From their mouths stare back at me, Their eyes deep sponges of light. They know me and do not run Away. Coming up the road Through the black oak shadows, I See ahead of me, glinting Everywhere from the dusty Gravel, tiny points of cold Blue light, like the sparkle of Iron snow. I suspect what it is, And kneel to see. Under each Pebble and oak leaf is a Spider, her eyes shining at Me with my reflected light Across immeasurable distance.

September breeze, an island chill, the streets so quiet . . . still, seem wider now but soon they fill with gulls that stride and squawk and boldly walk the middle of the road— I wish I understood gull-talk perhaps they, too, feel harmony no crowds, no noise now once again just sand, waves, sky, and sea . . . just gulls and me

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials and in the pastures let the rough winds fly. As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness. Direct on them two days of warmer light to hale them golden toward their term, and harry the last few drops of sweetness through the wine. Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter; who lives alone will live indefinitely so, waking up to read a little, draft long letters, and, along the city's avenues, fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

But it could not be brought to see what it could be brought. And the leaves are away again, teamed. A parent at the last and a parent in the middle. And as stones I thought it right. Two plates, and on the other side all the forest pieces. The clock says stay. The books lower the earth, and in gardens flat stones spin. The volume was of waiting. Today is today, until the preposition taken up. Next to the tree sways. The sky in pieces the leaves part the leaves piece together. To and from a hand given all directions. The bark comes from below. Takes from the books of the moves under the sky. Speaker holds up the talks held last. Motors the dust and the yellow syllables. A slant on which was never here or only partly.

En mi país el Otoño nace de una flor seca, de algunos pajaros; . . . o del vaho penetrante de ciertos rios de la llanura. —Molinari, “Oda a una larga tristeza” Each instant comes with a price, the blue-edged bill on the draft of a bird almost incarnadine, the shanked ochre of an inn that sits as still as the beavertail cactus it guards (the fine rose of that flower gone as bronze as sand), the river's chalky white insistence as it moves past the gray afternoon toward sunset. Autumn feels the chill of a late summer lit only by goldenrod and a misplaced strand of blackberries; deplores all such sleight of hand; turns sullen, selfish, envious, full of regret. Someone more adept would mute its voice. The spill of its truncated experience would shine less bravely and, out of the dust and dunghill of this existence (call it hope, in decline), as here the blue light of autumn falls, command what is left of exhilaration and fit this season's unfolding to the alphabet of turn and counterturn, all that implicit arc of a heart searching for a place to stand. Yet even that diminished voice can withstand the currying of its spirit. Here lies—not yet. If, and only if, the leafless rose he sees, or thinks he sees, flowered a moment ago, this endangered heart flows with the river that flees the plain, and listens with eye raised to the slow revelation of cloud, hoping to approve himself, or to admonish the rose for slight transgressions of the past, this the ecstatic ethos, a logic that seems set to reprove his facility with unsettling delight. Autumn might be only desire, a Twelfth Night gone awry, a gift almost too emphatic. Logic in a faithful light somehow appeases the rose, and stirs the hummingbird's vibrato. By moving, I can stand where the light eases me into the river's feathered arms, and, so, with the heat of my devotion, again prove devotion, if not this moment, pure, finite. Autumn cradles me with idiomatic certainty, leaves me nothing to disapprove. I now acknowledge this red moon, to requite the heart alone given power to recite its faith, what a cradled life finds emblematic.

Just then, encountering my ruddy face in the grand piano's cold black craquelure, it conjured the jack-o'-lantern moon dipping up over the roofs of the Tenderloin. Only when I have done with the myths— the inner spill that triggers us to flame, breasts so sensitive a moment's touch will call down fever; the dark sea-lane between limbic squall and the heart's harbour— will I picture you, just beyond innocence, lying stripped by a thrown-wide window, letting the cool breeze covet your ardour.

The birds have flown their summer skies to the south, And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion, Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves. A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea, A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping An aging whiskey of distances and departures. Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land. My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave. I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe, Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.