The Obligatory Autumn Poem
15 November 2009
Falling Colors
It’s November
We have used up
Our allotment of color for this year;
The pigment wells have run dry
Colors are draining from the landscape.
Inexorable fading
Among the maples after a drunken Halloween binge
The reds wither in unpicked apples or
Go into hiding –
Submerged as cranberries or
Crouching in the holly
Yellows and greens
Have more stamina but even they
Are sinking quickly, visibly, into the soil.
On a warm day
The blue sky
Is tepid and wan
And my energy filters
Down through my numb, wiggling toes
Chasing the colors
Flexing in hopes of priming the pump
Even as I succumb to the unfulfilled promise
Of a long winter’s nap.
November 2009
Tsunami
17 September 2009
It seems that most people
Hatch dreams
At the beach
But I have known
For a long time
That the beach
Is where dreams go to die
The wind and the water
They
Unravel
Everything
When the tangle of thought
And emotion
Is too tight
The beach is where I find them
Unspooling
That is where
I feel rage
And it dissipates in the wind
As I try to walk it off
And then
I think
No one will see how deep it runs in me
The beach
It has more broken things than whole ones
It sweeps what is fragile
Away
And dumps the remains back
Days weeks years
Later
Shells
Fish
Children
Societies
Refuse to treasure
Treasure to refuse
Paradise
To whom?
January 2005
