Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, IN EARLY AUTUMN, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

IN EARLY AUTUMN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: On a day when the trees are exchanging the cured gold of the sun
Last Line: Under this hill of bones that calls my flesh its home
Subject(s): Autumn; Colors; Seasons; Trees; Fall


On a day when the trees are exchanging the cured gold of the sun,
And the heavy oils of darkness in the rivers of their circular hearts
thicken;
when desperation has entered the song of the locust;
When, in abandoned farmsites, the dark stays longer
In the closed parlor;
a day when exhausted back-country roads,
Those barges loaded with sunlight and the bodies of dead animals,
Disappear into the Sand Hills under a swollen sun;
A day, too, when the sizzling flies are fingering their rosaries of blood
In the furry cathedrals of spent flesh, the left-over
Gone-green goners from the golden summer --

THEN I know a place with three dead dogs and two dead deer in one ditch.
I feel the displacement of minerals,
The stone grown fossils,
Under this hill of bones that calls my flesh its home.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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