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.
The only summers I remember
Were so long ago the moss grew
And contracted, gray and brittle of
Such age and unworthiness
Grassy refuge fell and tumbled house
Disappeared from reality
Mists grew before eyes unable
Or unworthy to let go
The only summers worth summoning
Seem to pull yet further as fall
Without shame intervenes
And treeless leaves gather
And blow begone with no regard
For foot-dragging eye-squinting
Mumble-dim revision
Or re-visioning
The only summers’ slowly fading
Leaving traces only
Flickering transitory ghosts
But the worst of it is the sheer
Lack of spectacle the way lovers long gone
Become mere characters in your story
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
Summer mornings, when I was very young
My father would announce an outing
And my mother packed a lunch
And gathered up my infant sister
My older brothers, eye-rolling
And infinitely wise, despairing of
The younger generation
Gathered necessities defined by long
(several weeks)
Tradition and off we trundled
Those days, people walked
And so did we
Past shoe shops and drugstores
(always a brief, longing pause)
Hill high houses and pooched porches
Scraggle lawn-bare bungalows
Vacant lots, still equipped
With bottle bases and cardboard home plates
And the occasional mildewed fielder’s mitt
Wantonly discarded in a fit of pique
Past milk jugs left in sun-swept doorways
Cars on concrete blocks, their wheels
Unseen and unimagined
Down past side streets and alleyways
And trellised garden glimpses
Down to the parkway past
The big-bricked library
Packed from floor to ceiling
With adventure, intrigue,
Piracy and noble experiment,
With love and loss,
With everything that was not us
On summer mornings
Across the broad car-fringed roadway we went
To a certain large elm
Strewn about with green immortal grass
And laid out our blankets
Ate our lunch
And dozed the day away
My brothers off on some creek-filled adventure
Was life unkind?
Probably, obliviously, inobviously,
And perfectly.
exiles child 