When you've had your fun and you've had your laughs and your mind starts to wonder to the past.
When your plastered smile turns to a frown and you feel your heart turning around.
When your days are short and your nights are long and it feels so impossible to be strong.
When you hear your soul cry out for me, I'm still right here where I said I'd be.

One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

The premiss from which all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums' odor.

The summer grasses
All that remains
Of brave soldiers dreams

— and the sun, dipping into the avenues
streaking the tops of
the irregular red houselets,
                                                            and
the gay shadows drooping and drooping.