In "Summer Postmortem" the speaker plays coroner. The end of the season is treated as a death to be investigated, with a body, a precise measurement ("100 feet downridge"), a trail of clues and something close to a verdict. The body is "her green leaf body", found at the foot of an oak in the first snow. The personification is oddly literal: not a lady in a flowing gown, but a heap of leaves that are still green, as if summer was cut off before it could turn. The human world intrudes on the scene too. "The smell of diesel" drifts through the snowy valley, so this is not untouched wilderness.
The poem's central idea is that grief for a season becomes a meditation on wounds and containers, on what can be emptied and what can be filled. The trees are "more and more vacant", a fallen nest lies on the ground, and the nest is made of "wild / gravevine bark". In the text as given the word reads "gravevine". Whether that is a slip for grapevine or a deliberate pun, the word "grave" ends up woven into the nest, and it fits the poem's mood. The empty trees "shriek / and moan in the wind", so the bareness is loud, like mourners in an empty house.
Then the speaker remembers "what jesus / said about new wine // and old wine skins". The Gospel image is of a container that must be able to hold what is poured into it. The poem bends it toward a katydid "lasting // long enough to be filled / with the unknown". An insect's husk, or an insect's brief life, becomes a vessel for whatever comes next. The idea slides straight into the spruce "weeping / white beards of sap" from "dozens of rows / of sapsucker-drilled wells". The word "wells" turns the bird's damage into something that holds liquid, and the tree is both vessel and wound. The poem notes that "all those wounds" are "somehow still open". That could mean they refuse to heal, or that they stay receptive, and the poem lets both readings stand.
Against this, the refrain returns with a harder edge: "summer is dead / they crucified her". The first time, the sentence is a plain announcement. The second time it comes with an accusation and a religious frame. Who "they" are is never said. Judging by the diesel, the hunters and the drilled tree, the answer seems to be a tangle of weather, animals and people. The sapsucker's neat rows of holes echo the wounds of crucifixion, but the poem never claims a neat resurrection.
The form suits this mood. Every stanza is a couplet, and there is no rhyme and no punctuation apart from one apostrophe. Even "jesus" has no capital letter, which gives the voice a humble, thinking-aloud tone, like notes jotted on a walk. The lines are short, and the sentences run over the breaks in ways that mimic a wandering attention: "i remember what jesus / said", "like this katydid lasting // long enough". Each couplet is a few steps along the trail. Sound still does some work. "Shriek" and "moan" are harsh and drawn-out, and "weeping white beards" has a soft, wet w-sound that suits dripping sap.
The ending is the poem's best surprise. Two deer "bound past / without seeing me", which makes the speaker almost invisible, a still witness. A buck chases them, "holding [his antlers] high / almost shining". After so much bareness the animal arrives like a procession. Then comes the last couplet: "his rack as the hunters call it / his naked tree". The hunters' word reduces the antlers to a trophy. The speaker answers with a metaphor that renames them, so the buck carries a leafless tree through a landscape of vacant trees. Something that looked like absence is turned into a moving, living form.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses both easy options. It does not sentimentalise autumn, and it does not tidy grief into consolation. Instead, it lets scripture, forensic detail, hunting talk and close observation of birds and insects argue in one quiet voice. The final image offers no promise that summer will return. It suggests that bare things can still shine, and that attention itself is a kind of answer to loss.