In November


                In November, in November
                when the days are wet and dark
                and the schoolbus wind explodes
                like Ardennes poplar bark,
                when the string quartets play football
                and the traffic stinks of hate,
                in November, in November,
                far too chilly, way too late.
                Discarding adolescence 
                we fled the record hop,
                whirling frocks, torn blue jeans,
                a beat that wouldn’t stop.
                Your eyes were golf-course green,
                your throat was arctic-white,
                my thoughts danced like obscene
                things Suetonius might write:
                it was November, bleak November,
                so nothing felt quite right.
                Homeless birds chewed bubblegum,
                the sewers ate up leaves,
                barbed wire sprung up in your yard
                while star shells pruned the trees.
                In November, in November
                the moon shone on the steeple;
                like fetuses curled indoors
                we watched movies of dead people
                foxtrotting over polished floors
                and cycled swathed in Harris tweed
                across blank urban moors,
                dreamed of providential sparrows
                and wars we never fought
                with dirks and pikes and arrows,
                feared diseases no one caught.
                In November, in November
                when crime vaults from despair
                and the grass is sunk in ashes
                and it’s awfully hard to care,
                crazy branches black and crooked
                rake the empty migraine sky--
                in November, dull November,
                when it’s what but never why.
                In November you remember
                that time itself is stark
                like a no man’s land that’s trackless,
                like a corridor gone dark.

“In November” first appeared in Poem


Nostalgia for November


E-minor was its key, that symphony 
of abbreviated days and extruded 
nights expelled like ascending divers’ breaths, 
pedal-point, kettle-drum and cello doling 
darkness a sooty baritone.  People 
charged into the streets aiming their shoulders 
like fullbacks racked by mid-season aches.  All 
work, no play, fraternal grimaces were 
few, like those of sailors sweating at the 
pump of some sinking sloop; yet under your
shapeless jumper must have been those holy 
places I could tell off one by one but
had no warrant to see or smell or stroke.  
Solitary pathos, there’s a cliché 
compels no pity.  Whoever does not 
long to be loved, pleads for no perpetual 
proofs, he’s held wise; yet such wisdom feels like
death’s first teasing tickle.  The boring film
of crowds flashing by in subway frames
reiterates that life is need, is need, 
is the endless panting to have.  Were there
a saint among them, one of the thirty-six
just men, even he would shiver in the 
descending chill, would for a promise of 
love disclose his secret identity, 
the Atlas shudder each chilled accountant 
and secretary dreads.  In bared branches I
glimpsed your naked arms; in the music store
the adagio maestoso of 
your curved back; in the braying of drunken
freshmen, the rapture of ancient autumns. 
Beside such vigorous folly even 
hard-bought wisdom yields poor consolation. 

“Nostalgia for November” first appeared in Cimarron Review