Once more by the brook the alder leaves turn mauve, bronze, violet, beautiful after the green of crude summer; galled black stems, pithy, tangled, twist in the flesh-colored vines of wild cyclamen. Mist drifts below the mountaintop in prismatic tatters. The brook is full, spilling down heavily, loudly, in silver spate from the beaver ponds in the high marshy meadows. The year is sinking: heavily, loudly, beautifully. Deer move heavily in the brush like bears, half drunk on masty acorns and rotten wild apples. The pileated woodpecker thumps a dead elm slowly, irregularly, meditatively. Like a broken telephone a cricket rings without assertion in dead asters and goldenrod; asters gone cloudy with seed, goldenrod burnt and blackened. A gray trout rests under the lip of glacial stone. One by one the alder leaves plunge down to earth, veering, and lie there, glowing, like a shirt of Nessus. My heart in my ribs does what it has done occasionally all my life: thumps and heaves suddenly in irregular rhythm that makes me gasp. How many times has this season turned and gone down? How many! I move heavily into the bracken, and the deer stand still a moment, uncertain, before they break away, snorting and bounding heavily before me. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CHINESE LAUNDRYMAN by KAREN SWENSON EGOISME A DEUX' by LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON THE SONG OF THE PILGRIMS by RUPERT BROOKE THE VAMPIRE by RUDYARD KIPLING THE SONG OF FIONNUALA by THOMAS MOORE THE VICAR by WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED |