I.
The evening grosbeak on the lawn
Will turn his back on us, move on
With his wide family and those friends
We thought were ours. That’s how it ends.
If it’s been good, be glad it’s been;
It won’t be. The cold shoulder’s in
We must make do, once summer’s done,
With our fair-weather friends or none.
II.
The garden’s garter snake,
the warty toad in our garage
don’t get around these days.
Woodchuck and rabbit sink
into themselves; if they
have some idea, who’s to say?
The few birds left accept
the mob opinions
and the fashions: a dull
III.
Stalinist grey that will
offend no one. The turtles
turn tail on the pond, withdraw
to meditate, regroup or,
joining what’s too big to beat,
dig down in the numb
security of clay, one
with their fate.
In spray-paint, psychedelic, gaudy,
Fall scrawls its name—a blunt and bawdy
Challenge to the complacent wood.
We say: there goes the neighborhood;
It is not and it cannot come to good.
Soon, flustered leaves will sag like torn
Wallpaper; solid dark walls, worn
Through here and there, expose a bitter
Sky while, on the bare ground, litter
And stub ends pile up everywhere.
Not even one green plant would dare
Poke its nose out in that crude air
Of catch-as-catch-can thievery, lust,
Cut-throat protection and sick trust.
Where year by year we walked together
Determined paths, a wilder atmosphere
Wheels in, flaunting its chains, blades and black leather.
IV.
Imperial greenery withdraws,
flamboyant and corrupt; the leaf’s
far government’s lost
faith in its mission, that certainty
to be despotic and
victorious. Now failure’s
certain, a certain
mercy enters in; such as
it is, the sun
gets spread around, the magnanimity
of the poor. Only some pines,
hard-needled loyalists, cling
to their colors and won’t change. Dark,
under those implacable branches,
nothing grows.
V.
Maple and ash in the hedgerow
Figure the green light’s gone and go
To a flat brown. The white-tailed deer
Must know what’s up; they disappear
Like high ideals. Across the field,
Mallows and black-eyed Susans yield
To the solicitude of tractor
And combine, like a trash compactor
Crushing the summer’s shapes and scents—
Leaf, stem and petal-into dense
Blocks scattered like packed bags and crates
Around the field while the field waits.
VI.
Sharp, black crickets
have got the house
surrounded; miners and sappers
gnaw our siding;
buckwheat flies, wasps
and spiders—spies—
thread the cellar and the walls.
And these are the deserters
who’ve lost the front
outside. Put on fat;
put on fur; the windows
rattle. The only news
says we’ll know soon
what sort of man you are.
VII.
Bark strips peel off the sycamore
Like weathered clapboards. The wind’s war
Moves up closer. Our woodlot’s floor
Fills up with wreckage like a village
Fought and recaptured. Ripe for pillage,
Berries and haws shine down a street
Where the racoon and field mouse beat
A long, inglorious retreat.
VIII.
Bare bones! bare bones!
is the wind’s suggestion
and, one by one, leaves,
like bright embroidery
rinsed in bleach or like
words in the brain’s skein,
the tree of memory,
are gone. All sweet details
pass on in
“the abstraction
of old age”: skeletal
trunk and branchings, lacy
tracework of each leaf,
medulla and the neural reach
of those ways we once knew
things we forget
under the soft, featureless
democracy of snow.