A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’ s barn
is only apple blossoms.
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.
Think of our blindness where the water burned!
Are we so certain that those wings, returned
And turning, we had half discerned
Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen
The bird aloft there, did not mean? —
Our hearts so seized upon the sign!
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires — and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings — the huts,
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,
Our embargo's off at last;
Favourable breezes blowing
Bend the canvass o'er the mast.
From aloft the signal's streaming,
Hark! the farewell gun is fir'd;
Women screeching, tars blaspheming,
Tell us that our time's expir'd.
Here's a rascal
Come to task all,
Prying from the custom-house;
Turn again, turn again,
Goose Clothilda, Goosie Jane.
Bright wooden waves of people creak
From houses built with coloured straws
Of heat; Dean Pasppus’ long nose snores
Harsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.
The wooden waves of people creak
Through the fields all water-sleek.
And in among the straws of light
Those bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight.
Whence he lies snoring like the moon
Clownish-white all afternoon.
Beneath the trees’ arsenical
Sharp woodwind tunes; heretical —
The city and the continent
trail off into cold black
water the same way: at
the western edge, a flat
stretch with precipitous
planes set perpendicular
and back from the beach
or beach-equivalent, a blacktop
margin where the drugged
and dying trudge, queue up
for Hades. Bolinas
had its junkie lady with gray
skin, gray sweater, stumbling
through the sand with the short-
burst intensity and long-run aimlessness
of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers.
The night reduced to a siren, a sigh:
Beautiful boy on the treadmill
Glimpsed sweating through sweating glass —
My new moon.
Sylvia’ s moon: a smiling skull
Snagged in witchy branches; fossil
Brushed free of blackest earth.
My last moon: an orange ball at rest, for an instant,
On the grey lake.
Wish list: dining set and dresser,
Boombox, thin black tie, boy-
Friend à la Madonna’ s “True Blue”
La la la la la la la
Your moon (tonight): a clouded X-ray.
I stand at a corner and stare up,
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
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,
