Well, after all, Mel Torme did write the Christmas Song in July …
Fall came blowing in
Swept summer into yesterday
And all our dreams of reckoning with it.
Among these dead leaves
Wind-strewn and weary
Our footsteps fail to echo
The substance of our lives
Growing soft
Beneath the husk of a moon
Growing old
Too soon
A photograph:
Fields the color of winter
Nothing growing, nothing moving,
Just you, looking over your shoulder
As if I could still touch you.
In the great withered dugs
Of Holy Mother Church
I was taught to beg God’s forgiveness
For my transgressions
Real, imagined, or only aspired to
But really, I thought,
For the sheer gall of living
For the audacity of human-ness
For the clear inexcusable lack
Of appreciation for the
Perversity of existence
As humanity
Of which I was but one
Paltry example
Now I know it’s
Not God who can forgive
But only I
For the willfulness
Of falling for that
New snow
Cold and weightless
As yesterday’s ghosts
We live so that graveyards
May be full of forgotten worries
We strive so that our hopes and fears
Will lie with us as our essence
Bleeds into the indifferent clay
The bits and pieces of our living
Drift out into the vagrant air
To be reborn in the yet unguessed
Strivings of the yet unknown
Leaving some vague imprint
On the great entropic vastness
exiles child 