October 35

The change of the season,
if it wasn’t here what else
to do over there other than
count and clean your tally?
Question hideously precise.

There is a valuable lack in
not getting a good night’s rest,
when you wake more broken
than tired in the OK autumn
absence of unheld morning.

Ample smell of a mephitic skunk
burrowing away from the light
beneath an acidic bed of leaves,
hints at a future not yet sensed.

On the porches by the lawns,
electronic newspapers. I have one
but without effect on my suspicion
of yesterday’s answers as sun
wanes in the labyrinths of both
the seen and the unseen forests.

Once upon a time, ago, a reply
full of a green life lobbing abundant
through the brunt of endurance,
steaming audaciously with
a brawn of attributable might.
So full of vigor I braved
wonder where it does all go.

That is then when all thoughts
do go, enfeebled to the wind,
elegies of tissue paper into
the flamed passings that blaze
extensions for only a few seconds
of color, cincturing brilliantly
red, the quick burnt meaning in
the hollow frames of empty nooks.

When we want it done and complete,
we sit by the fire, warm, cook the oldest
calf and harvest, full and with heat,
a border protected, lurking in a pit.

Stay hungry-- the girded bark textures
stay outward, tympanic slated recompense
from a pursed area set over with a dried
understory of hazel, those ashen trunks,

depthless gray, as a sky gets when
stand three sentries over a crimpled
scene, watching pinched absences,
heavy bindings of density, destiny
in the vale to be heard so much later.