If I could store away
the beauty of Autumn
like a squirrel collecting nuts,
I could harvest the charity
of nature's grace and beauty.
I could fold away, within
my core, my love for the
easy air and the smell
of sweet forests and burning leaves.
Each icy day of gray Winter
could unravel my bundle
of happiness a little bit
until it was all used up
and Winter was through.
Then Spring could restore me.
It could remind me of warmth
and life and the color of leaves
when they are first birthed
from their mother trees.
Yes, if I could store away
my happiness in Autumn,
the Winter could be easy.

goaded by a stereophonic monotone:
a flumine voice waxes with lovelorn dregs.

i heard the plump word of rescue
dangle from the heady decibel of song,
winterward, blue-veined and stillicide.

no more, shall the wind traverse the impasse of the verdigris. the incertitude
of beginnings sigh ultimately.

o people, your darling children soldered
to your denims. o rosefrail and sightless
bannerets — we mourn such coming.
it sleuths with a tangle of fingers
underneath fringes of flesh-warmed
draperies with a different temperament
as moderate as climates in squandered tropics, flows with a truth wishing it
more of the untruth:

never shall return, in faraway lands,
never shall look back and lay in prairies
attenuated, continue to sing oblivion.

in my heart's deserted street—

on the road and the cornucopia
of twists, and the unmindful turn:

surrounded by white-bellied,
inward-breaking, bright-***** creatures
as oblivion falls flat on the cage
rimmed with the glint of a scene's
surrounding peril.

what to make of it, now that i am alone?
the gladiolus is cut and my heart
sings winterward.

i can paint now with blood—
naked boys eaten by serpents,
a home fractured in the middle
of flightlessness. the sunlight,
the lie, the feigned sublimation of moon,
the audible death of star, felled on the floor, laughing, squirming insanely
on a waving line, water not warm enough
to bathe in, this serious multitudinously-blooded sea where i find
            
      nobody at all.
cutting the silence,
         bleeding the noise,
emptying the horizons,

     filling only the streets,
      


   but never myself.