We're drifting in the evening,
dreaming with the leaves.
The autumn holds a moment,
a portent in the eaves.
The season heaves.
Brown skeletons are gleaming.

The clouds are only swallows
borrowed from bare trees.
The washed canvas sky
dries with arrows of geese.
A watcher breathes
in cloudy gasps, and grows.

All of town is lit tonight
and blazing on twenty screens.
The roadside trees are desolate
and defeated things, a black phone rings,
the stars may hardly be seen.

Childe Roland
to the last tower came.
His mail was a twisting
matted beard.

His sidearm appeared
more of a gesture.
A Stanley knife
and selected verse.

He muttered blackly in his mirth;
Fi, fie, foh, fum.
I smell the blood
of a million men.

Is it harder to open or close a book?
Certainly at a look, seven PM
in September is somewhere to be.
The hardening light, the steady cessation,
the Southbound birds - gliding from the station.

April ages more subtly,
with a wholly crueller edge.
The ease of unfolding at seven AM
seems granted for everything new.
But not among these arrowing swifts -
are the Stones, and by degrees, you.

Absence is not darkness
but only the channels between
Islands of light lining streets
and rows of tents unseen

Solitude is a seven-starred cape,
black pavements pass like minutes
The alleys of isolation stretch
and gape, with well-lit limits.

At a desk, coffee sachets rest.
Long-life milk harbours
white dreams of expiry.
Shuffling in his forgetful nest
a grey man blinks
at the intruding light.

Americo, do you remember
your antique power,
that opened like a rose
on the walls of Hiroshima?

A meter empty on a hill
by two trees glowing unashamed.
One bore life while one could fill
a cup with thickly flowing thought
and drive the couple cursed and blamed
from Eden or the parking lot.