Light unloosens itself. Space slackens.
A figure of a shadow I have conjured before
anonymous eyes. Lapping up the waiflike bleakness
of their elliptical faces.

                               I must teach the trees to let go
of autumn, and relegate spryness to the hearth
of cold without merit, this slow, claiming mutiny
with its face-oval peering through windows multiplying
lovelessly, a crunch of a leaf, suchlike, flourishing
in peerless company. Before me, the sound of footfall
preparing to make sense, a rotunda of bell – that movement
of somebody done for, so ****** the scald welt of ******,
the belch of the world like a pore clearing its squalor.
Or the toppled verdigris of gull.

    Autumn’s greater extension, the abeyance, smilingly
a facsimile of crowds – its roads adorned with laburnum
singeing through the morning’s cauldron, a waft of bald terrain
inflamed, drawing with absence
      a crippled drip of rain back into the world’s dim address.