The autumn sun sweeps
clean the street, forlorn no more.
Even the litter-born history,
so recently past, cannot withstand it.
We think we’re the true organisms,
that to us belong the spoils
of living, and yet,
such marionettes of weather,
our strings showing
in spite of all our efforts,
the sky like water,
our hearts like wind.
In abrupt autumn
one sees much of expectation
wither and dissipate
as if never taken seriously,
as if intentions of good will
and promises of productive labor,
— all leaving of self in favor of virtue —
gone like a good but tardy
glacier, dim and dry,
parsed to the death.
What remains is that wispy thread,
barely traceable, but more real and reliable
than all the will gathered in all the
small rooms and resolutions of change,
the thread that runs umbilical,
winding though good or ill,
tying together all the disparate selves
pasted together in the course of a life.
In this suddenly strange autumn,
in this fall, it is the unreality
that glows, beacon-like,
though, in the end, what you remember
is that carnal you,
that piece of protoplasmic geometry.
And you ask yourself, is that me?
And yet, there is memory, inconstant,
but persistently convincing.
I understand the consciousness of others,
the subjectivity of their being,
but not my own,
not my own.
I read great poets, great beacons,
Their eyes so keen,
Their voices clear as sunlight
With a winter slant, harsh,
But welcome all the same.
Personally,
I’ve grown used to irrelevance,
Come to prefer it.
My history of judgment
Is spotty, at best
My place in the grand confusion
Of existence
Is in the chorus,
Oblivious,
One small voice
Bleating among many,
One fading light
In the great kaleidoscope,
Whispering, more than declaiming,
Twinkling, more than illuminating.
But it’s me, inaudible at times,
Barely discernable,
Me
Fall comes upon us
All gaudy and draped in red
Like yesterday’s blood
From today’s Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets comes this 19th century gem from William Cullen Bryant.
Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o’er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o’er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.
Those old guys had some chops!
exiles child 