october

Ashes browning, needles bedded,

the breath of old black ale;

winter’s thinning in the blood,

reddish in the sumac’s feathers,

dreadful in the lay of mottled mosses,

in the stands of silver maple pluming a demise

on sky too blatant, too untoward for sky;

there’s mayhem in the dry-shell milkweed pod

tonguing its last silken purse with spore,

in the migrant honking flock

swelling out from in and back again

to water falling in a snapping gust;

the drowned, bedraggled knapweed in the brush

flings random-counted seeds to feed the current,

the falling oak leaf dwindles down

to palm a summer in its shoreless edges.