Lilacs look neon in fading light.
Death makes life shine:
a tiredness, a flickering between
ages, which is each age;
a piling up to tottering
and falling back to sand.
So much for cycle. The front door lock
sticks each fall when we’ re first back.
We are advised to oil it.
Olive oil in the keyhole:
again the old key turns.
Once again to meander
along the edge of water,
whether tideless sea or tidal river,
pushing the stroller, dreaming
It has arrived — the long rag rug
multiply folded. On top, one alien hair.
I put my face to the folds and smell despair
palpable as salt air
in all those rooms and houses, small and smug —
enclosures I passed through on my way where?
Ida and Isidor Straus sleep side by side
eternally in an Egyptian galley
fronting their Woodlawn mausoleum.
Symbolically they lie. Their boat is small;
nor was her body recovered from the Titanic.
And yet the image of the voyage holds.
Why not embark? A river runs behind me
on the other side of this dark window.
A dream called Night Boat
arranged us side by side in a black craft,
sailing the river of forgetfulness
until the stars went out.
Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn —
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.
Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’ s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.
Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,
Sing now the heavy furniture of the fall,
the journey’ s ending. Strong Aeneas bears
deep on his shoulders all the dark wood chairs
and tables of destruction. Bruising, blunt,
they force his feet on up the war-scraped hills
past raped dead temples. All Achilles kills
litters the trail of sofa legs with other
