Joan Mazza Verse-Virtual 2017 September

September 2017

I’m retired from my work as a microbiologist and later as a psychotherapist. I love the freedom to do as I please, to create handmade one-of-a-kind cards or sew quilts, or work on poetry, dipping in and out of it like a tern running along the shore. By reading and writing poetry, I come to terms with my obsessions. www.JoanMazza.com

Autumn’s Connotation

It’s not because I’m past sixty I love this season,
the drying out, decay, decline. Not the whiff
of chill that starts the dying. Not because summer
was so hot I love anticipating winter when everything’s
stripped bare, trees naked like crooked armatures,
each branch outlined clear against blue sky.

It’s not my wrinkled, thinning skin that makes me
love these metaphors of senescence. Not the constancy
of sciatica, lumbago, or one eyelid’s chronic tic
as I observe the world’s decomposition.

No, it’s this time of drawing inward, staying home
with pets, inside. Beneath the greens and browns
are red and gold, the swishing whispers of leaves
against our ankles. Return of firelight remembered,
flames visible through cloudy mica windows
of a Ben Franklin pot-bellied stove, old bungalow

at summer’s end when I was ten. Before school,
after two months of reading, writing, fishing—
far from father, alone with Mother.

[published Boston Literary Review, September 2014]

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