Trees in Autumn

We are the autumn trees

changing color, green to red

and gold, orange and brown, leaves 

shed from our limbs and stripped bare,

our beauty diminished, to lie dormant,

black on white, deep and dark, stark

till spring’s return, and changed,

beautiful and strong; we are all

like that, each in his own season.

The Path to the Spring House

She got the path to the spring house

cleared after winter had ended

and the snow melted mostly away,

clearing away the autumn debris left

mashed and pressed under a season of ice:

the leaves she hadn’t raked up

before the snow started to fall

and the branches and twigs snapped

and fallen in the winter wind;

she cut the stalks of bordering plants

still standing, topless and un-blossomed,

and swept up now the reddened needles dropped

early that fall from the pine trees’ shedding.

And trimming back the rough edges of grass

from the walk, she revealed to us spring

shooting up in the cracks of the paving stones,

making its way from winter’s cold and our home’s

dry heat to the sunlit rooms of summer,

gauzy curtains blown out in a breeze carrying aloft

the sounds of the lake, the waves’ gentle slap on the shore

and the loons’ call warbling, the song birds’ song

returning, too, reminding us of the years

gone past and the years ahead,

made fresh in the season changing.

Heart, you softy, you sap--you're getting fat

Heart, you softy, you sap—you’re getting fat,

sniffling there in the dark

to hide the tears that well in your eyes,

hiding there on reddened rims

ready to spill over in the next sad

scene of a movie you paid too much to see,

sitting alone there, weeping to yourself

over a lover lost, endangered, needing rescue,

and rescued, lives happily ever after,

as you knew she would, knew they would,

predictable in an animated romance.

It’s a feel-good movie, worth the price

of admission just to sit in the dark and cry

for what happened or didn’t in the movie

of your own life, tears shed and running down

your cheeks, dark rivulets streaking your face,

older now and creased, but feeling young again

and full of the possibilities of what could

have been, might have been in a different movie,

another time, another place, another star-studded feature

flashing before your eyes, that reality here

for a couple of hours, softly crying unseen in the dark.

Page 91

(A poetry exercise taking the first line of a published poem and creating your own poem in 10 minutes, minimally revised)

Small as a fly bump, the little voice

rose up from the tiny bed where she lay,

a night spent at grammy’s house

where grampy lived, too, in his gruffness

and scratchy face when he scooped her up

to his shoulders and whisked her off to bed,

setting her lightly down, like a bird settling

on a limb. And the story was told in a voice

loud, then soft and loud again, his voice

the voice of the animals in her favorite book,

the one she’d brought from home, an old friend.

And her voice rose up where she lay,

a little voice, small as a fly bump,

and her arms encircled his neck as she pulled

him close, gruff and scratchy, the smell

of the forbidden chocolate they had shared between them;

“I love you ... goodnight,” and she lay back down.

Turning off the light and pulling the covers tight,

“I love you, too,” he settled down next to her bed

till the little voice, small as a fly bump,

turned to the gentle snores of childhood.