October

1 A smudge for the horizon that, on a clear day, shows the hard edge of hills and buildings on the other coast.

Anchored boats all head one way: north, where the wind comes from.

You can see the storm inflating out of the west.

A dark hole in gray cloud twirls, widens, while white rips multiply on the water far out.

Wet tousled yellow leaves, thick on the slate terrace.

The jay’s hoarse cry.

He’s stumbling in the air, too soaked to fly.       2 Knuckles of the rain on the roof, chuckles into the drain- pipe, spatters on the leaves that litter the grass.

Melancholy morning, the tide full in the bay, an overflowing bowl.

At least, no wind, no roughness in the sky, its gray face bedraggled by its tears.       3 Peeling a pear,

I remember my daddy’s hand.

His thumb (the one that got nipped by the saw, lacked a nail) fit into the cored hollow of the slippery half his knife skinned so neatly.

Dad would pare the fruit from our orchard in the fall, while Mother boiled the jars, prepared for “putting up.” Dad used to darn our socks when we were small, and cut our hair and toenails.

Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d take turns in his lap.

He’d help bathe us sometimes.

Dad could do anything.

He built our dining table, chairs, the buffet, the bay window seat, my little desk of cherry wood where I wrote my first poems.

That day at the shop, splitting panel boards on the electric saw (oh,

I can hear the screech of it now, the whirling blade that sliced my daddy’s thumb ), he received the mar that, long after, in his coffin, distinguished his skilled hand.       4 I sit with braided fingers and closed eyes in a span of late sunlight.

The spokes are closing.

It is fall: warm milk of light, though from an aging breast.

I do not mean to pray.

The posture for thanks or supplication is the same as for weariness or relief.

But I am glad for the luck of light.

Surely it is godly, that it makes all things begin, and appear, and become actual to each other.

Light that’s sucked into the eye, warming the brain with wires of color.

Light that hatched life out of the cold egg of earth.       5 Dark wild honey, the lion’s eye color, you brought home from a country store.

Tastes of the work of shaggy bees on strong weeds, their midsummer bloom.

My brain’s electric circuit glows, like the lion’s iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move.

Thick transparent amber you brought home, the sweet that burns.       6 “The very hairs of your head are numbered,” said the words in my head, as the haircutter snipped and cut, my round head a newel poked out of the tent top’s slippery sheet, while my hairs’ straight rays rained down, making pattern on the neat vacant cosmos of my lap.

And maybe it was those tiny flies, phantoms of my aging eyes, seen out of the sides floating (that, when you turn to find them full face, always dissolve) but I saw,

I think, minuscule, marked in clearest ink,

Hairs s streaking little comets, till they tumbled to confuse with all the others in their fizzled heaps, in canyons of my lap.

And what keeps asking in my head now that, brushed off and finished,

I’m walking in the street, is how can those numbers remain all the way through, and all along the length of every hair, and even before each one is grown, apparently, through my scalp?

For, if the hairs of my head are numbered, it means no more and no less of them have ever, or will ever be.

In my head, now cool and light, thoughts, phantom white flies, take a fling:

This discovery can apply to everything.       7 Now and then, a red leaf riding the slow flow of gray water.

From the bridge, see far into the woods, now that limbs are bare, ground thick-littered.

See, along the scarcely gliding stream, the blanched, diminished, ragged swamp and woods the sun still spills into.

Stand still, stare hard into bramble and tangle, past leaning broken trunks, sprawled roots exposed.

Will something move?—some vision come to outline?

Yes, there— deep in—a dark bird hangs in the thicket, stretches a wing.

Reversing his perch, he says one “Chuck.” His shoulder-patch that should be red looks gray.

This old redwing has decided to stay, this year, not join the strenuous migration.

Better here, in the familiar, to fade.