Thin silver cloud-veils hide the moon.
The star-steeds of the chariot of night
Course for the western hills;
The west-wind a ceaseless flute playing,
With its stops of falling autumn leaves.
The forest and the valley a map
Drawn by the explorers in the land of reverie:
They color it with tones of violet and lavender;
Or, make rainbow waves of leaf and light
With tones from the changing palette of the breeze.
At last, the thin clouds become thinner yet;
The moon now a moonstone in an opal dream;
The leaves cease dropping, and dead the wind;
Begins a new measure, a new flute playing,
As the star-steeds' golden hoofs touch the western hills.
The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;
The cloud sheaves
in heaven's fields set
droop and are drawn
in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face
falling--I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace
Heaven's muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain
of tears, the store
The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.
For suddenly, flush-fallen,
All my life, in a rush
Of shedding away, has left me
Naked, exposed on the bush.
I, on the bush of the globe,
Like a newly-naked berry, shrink
Disclosed: but I also am prowling
As well in the scents that slink
Abroad: I in this naked berry
Of flesh that stands dismayed on the bush;
And I in the stealthy, brindled odours
Prowling about the lush
The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind
as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with
hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern
shutters.
Further down the valley the clustered tombstones
recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist's grey
cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly
started to bleed.
The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as
they pass
To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with
two dark-filled eyes
If you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple
Shining in the six o'clock September dusk:
If the red sumach on the autumn roads
Never danced on the flame of your eyelashes :
If the red-haws never burst in a million
Crimson fingertwists of your heartcrying:
If all this beauty of yours never crushed me
Then there are many flying acres of birds for me,
Many drumming gray wings going home I shall see,
Many crying voices riding the north wind.
These are the tawny days : your face comes back.
The grapes take on purple: the sunsets redden
early on the trellis.
The bashful mornings hurl gray mist on the stripes
of sunrise.
Creep, silver on the field, the frost is welcome.
Run on, yellow balls on the hills, and you tawny
pumpkin flowers, chasing your lines of orange.
Tawny days: and your face again.
Gold of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon,
Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue,
Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts,
Shining five and six in a row on a wooden fence.
Why do you keep wishes on your faces all day long,
Wishes like women with half-forgotten lovers going to
new cities?
What is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds,
crying down on the north wind in September, acres
of birds spotting the air going south?
Is there something finished? And some new beginning
on the way?
I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing
lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of
the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the
year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full
of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit
of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things
go, not one lasts.
I SPOT the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon ;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;
In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard
A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.
Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,
And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.
There are no birds,
And the goldenrod is gone.
And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;
And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper,
And all the world seems old!
Why should I weep for Autumn rain?
Give gusty Winter toll of tears?
I know that Spring will come again,
As in the other years.
And there is pleasure in wet ways.
In frozen fields, and mist-strange days;
What were eternal Spring to me.
Whose joy is in diversity!
Tang of fruitage in the air;
Red boughs bursting everywhere;
Shimmering of seeded grass;
Hooded gentians all a'mass.
Warmth of earth, and cloudless wind
Tearing off the husky rind,
Blowing feathered seeds to fall
By the sun-baked, sheltering wall.
Beech trees in a golden haze;
Hardy sumachs all ablaze,
Glowing through the silver birches.
How that pine tree shouts and lurches!
From the sunny door-jamb high,
Swings the shell of a butterfly.
Scrape of insect violins
Through the stubble shrilly dins.