They gather for an evening retreat 
with the grace of cartoon ballerinas.
Clad in the black of mourners,
ruffed like circus clowns,
rounded fully on the fat of the land,
they arrive in boastful numbers
and flap their slapstick impersonations 
of winged beauty, that graceful flight
of hollow-boned avian lightness 
which in the boisterous arrival of Meleagris Linnaeus
is disenchanted into the heaviness
of tree-tearing, leaf-scattering imitations of flight
better suited to the pratfalls of earth-bound clowns 
than the arabesques of winged visions.
 
Picture, instead, bowling balls in flight:
branches breaking, treetops-swaying, 
havoc-wreaking on the peace of evening, nature’s sweet soiree, 
caterwauling in the unintended sling-shot consequence
of panic-flap feathers, wings too stringy for the table 
clinging to a branch-snapping, twig-smashing, limb-swaying stumble 
through slender boughs and heavy air –
 
Who, we wonder aloud, invited this crowd for dinner?
What a bunch of turkeys.
                        

I know you don't think I'm on your side 
but, then – there are no sides.
Likely you see me as a sinner,
but in the heart of that truth 
toward which we universal wayfarers aim
there are neither trespasses nor trespassers.
Maybe I don't read your books, 
or don't read them the same way,
but I can read the writing on the wall.
I know the good words,
I know the place you wish to make your own.
At times I am there already,
or have sheltered there so often, at so many steps
     along the way.
Walk with me.
Walk with me when you play the music of your heart, 
for, already, 
I am walking with you.

Orange-glow October, Berkshire balmy, moving fast:
Don’t marry it, it won’t last.
Nature its own antidote to so much gold,
the bull market for an ecstasy that never gets old.
 
The leaves we admire have no way to know: 
After their flaunting, living-color show 
comes a broad-brush, universal recoil;
trashed underfoot, strained down to soil.
 
Why doesn’t it make us better to reflect
that all become compost, the lost, the elect?
Respect the grime of recomposing earth  
as the miraculous image of our rebirth?
 
We wish the dirt confined to other nails,
desire Infinite October, not wintry flails.
Flowers that last longest are never the best,
but in dark days to come outshine all the rest.