November in the South
 

                Somewhere a thousand miles down
                there's a silence between tin-roofed farms,
                corn stubble, and the steel wool
                of distant trees I owned on days
                the gray clouds swirled and combed
                like hair, lighter where the sun
                yellows as it sets.
 
                It's not cold but has been,
                the clay paths spewed up
                in red ice, everything still
                and vertical as nails, sepia
                photograph of rain. A far off pan
                of lake, cleaned of brush by the cold,
                is a puddle in a yard of brown grass.
 
                I follow trails across clearings of that
                knee-high hay-grass no one knows the name of,
                the arms of every oak at the woods'
                edge holding shadow
                like an x-ray, every pine
                layering its darkness.  I know inside
                the rusted shavings of leaves,
                smell of leafmeal, broken strings
                of pine needles.
 
                Maybe one duck, circling the lake
                before dark.
 
 
 
 

In Defense of November
                November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year.
                                                                  —Louisa May Alcott

I disagree, Louisa. I like it
when wind has raked the land,
discovering the grass green again
after the parchment of August,
sultry September, garish October,
the sky now cottony-cloudy
and comfy as a faded quilt.
No more guilt
about wasting days of long light
and high heat, grown tired of
like the ardor of an old love.
The world's been tidied away
into the earth, last year's fashions
folded under another layer of leaves.
 
Soon the solstice will spread its white linen
for the feast when the short days
diminish and light begins to bud 
into the big yellow bloom of spring,
freshets of thaw, resurrections,
the come-back, honeyed hum of bees.
 
See, Louisa? It’s November
we have to thank for these.
 
 



Wicks                                                                            
                 
                  I. Painswick
 
                  Death is the mother of beauty . . . .
                         She strews the leaves
                         Of sure obliteration on our paths . . . .
                                                                —Wallace Stevens
 
                  The colors this November (spinster, sad
                  stepsister month, hay hat trimmed
                  with falling leaves and clad
                  in holey, woolly, evening coat)
                  were still so perfect, although so late,
                  the sun was glad to cut its throat
                  at dusk and bleed above the hills to say,
                  How could I have topped today?
 
                  If death is the mother of beauty,
                  she's a widow, rich, rouged, and pearled,
                  with violet-tinted, silver curls,
                  leaving behind an orphan world
                  running naked everywhere,
                  precocious, sparking, red-haired, new.
                  She cries each evening in despair,
                  Child, whatever will become of you?
 
       
                  II. Giggleswick
 
                  Stands the church clock at ten to three?
                         And is there honey still for tea? 
                                                —Rupert Brooke
 
                   . . . and live alone in the bee-loud glade. 
                                                                         —W. B. Yeats
 
                  I imagine, never having been here,
                  the pub The Moon Under Water, beer
                  a stream trickling through the town
                  waving watercress for tea
                  sandwiches of brown
                  bread with yellow butter, fresh
                  eggs, afternoons of sunny
                  birdsong, bees, and the honey
                  cobbles beneath the horses' hooves
                  and wagon wheels,
                  no cars, of course, nor tourists,
                  keeping it quiet as the fields
                  around, the only quiet place I know
                  where I could go.    
​




In Heaven It Is Always Autumn                                                                                                                                     -John Donne
 
It all seemed to happen that same year
we lived in England, every hill golden
with the turning beeches, crimson apples
in the orchard by our cottage
muted pink by the mist rising
off the river reflecting
the upside down
palette of it all.
 
In Italy, the vineyards
wore the yellow, plaited hair
of harvest, every barn breathing out
the warm crush and gush of grapes
like the winey kisses of a long
luncheon tryst.
                                               
Time
had stopped.
The change
we couldn’t see coming
stalled for a while,
an Indian summer before the stroke.
 
Had it happened while we were hiking
the paths of fallen leaves, miles
from help, we’d have thought, though
not said, we hoped for any afterlife
to rival this heaven—color box
of plum, ocher, cinnamon, lemon— 
and the blood-red beauty of the dead
gone on before us.