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.
I
You are meaningless, it is said,
without those who went before
in whose long shadows you strive,
in whose helix you twine
inextricably.
Ghosts, you call them,
wraiths with no claim to substance,
until, in a mirror,
you see them bounding through
your fate,
great feet tramping up the path
you thought was yours alone.
How can you be so like them?
How can it have gone unnoticed
so long?
Is nothing left to separate you?
II
Fine, let’s have it, then.
I’ll be the last witness
to poll the seasons.
But you’ve lost your will
to power, haven’t you?
Would you think your
reflection grotesque, off-putting,
if you saw me now?
Would you see an empty mask,
devoid of all you held dear?
As you wish.
We are both powerless
to divine our true meaning.
The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates
So, I’m waiting for this horseman,
Windows barred, doors flung shut
In a vast pretense
Of indifference.
Only, I see roaches,
Resigned, driven by doom
Under cracks, seared by dim
Flashes of light, some blue,
Some red, not just unaware,
But irrelevant
Like distant quaking nuclei
Star struck long, long ago.
This means little,
For now not only exists,
But does not exist.
I.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
II.
Time is not a river
It is an ocean of many currents
Give me a raft to sail on
III.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
exiles child 