Pine boughs scattered on the lawn outside the window.

Leaves falling like particles of light,
as if composed purely of light.

I watch the windmill out back,
its tail-like rudder animated by the wind
                                                                  in search
of a position of least resistance, of quiet,
wandering as the living do, sent by the wind.

Purling fan blades shuttle like a loom,
purging the gully's rainwater up to feed
                                                                  the hillside's meandering stream,
until what moves it comes to a stop,
Fortune's wheel falling on zero, zippo, zilch.

*

First power outage of the year and I'm lost
shopping for pork roast and rosemary red potatoes
amid shelves draped with cobwebs and goblins,
plastic sacks of candy, the meat case garish in shadow
                                                                                        like the back of an unlit closet.
An old man pushes an empty cart down the aisle,
gaunt and jaundiced,
his belly swollen like a starving child's,
                                                                  his toothless mouth asking
which aisle is the milk,
                                            image of a walking ghost.

*

Spring amazed us with its soft parade of fragrance and color: but how brief
the azalea, the pink in the cherry.

Summer a long calm, a steady pouring forth.

And this year, easy September stretching long into October —
                                                                                                              unseasonable, warm.

The garden on a marathon: new sprigs of lobelia coming,
blades of tulip, hyacinth and daffodil piercing the autumn soil.
The espaliered apple confused into setting fresh buds.
Ripe apples sharing the same branch as dead leaves, white blossoms,
new fruit forming.
                                            An impossible diorama,
like the great still lifes of the old masters:
flower, fruit and fowl from the entire year
                                                                  captured together on one table.
Image of the infinite.
As if all time were present outside of time, a glorious hoax,
                                                                                                              a higher reality.

*

Can nature ever be wrong?
Autumn a gold tone across the sky, the trees burnished. An illuminated
manuscript.

The warm days drawing the sap into the leaves,
                                                                                        the sumac, sugar maples, flaming
red, ochre, bronze, gold. The lawn littered with a glowing detritus.

And now the cold winds at mid-day
                                                                  scattered showers,
dead leaves blowing from the maples, the sky socked in at night.
A lone jetliner rumbles overhead under cloudcover,
rain pattering at the grape's canopy of leaves,
the hail-battered lettuce beds, the sky a smoky glass,
                                                                                                   winter coming.

*

In our bed we've shared
                                            more years than not, cocooned in down
we listen to the ancient elm pair at the end of the block
strain in the night, their great sinewed trunks
                                                                                        grown old, battered,
their thick bark lichen-flecked, balding.
Some wayward lower limbs too heavy and horizontal,
                                                                                                              weak crotches, you call them —
better to be cut away clean,
                                            then left to tear away ragged
in the next winter storm, splitting the trunk.

The long, dolorous cry of a Burlington Northern train
pierces the darkness
                                            less warning than song
fading as it disappears into a tunnel under the city.
                                                                                        Siren of the lost and the looking.
Though for years we've searched by light of day
we've never found
                                 where the tunnel emerges.

*

A cloud of starlings swarms the twin cathedral steeples
of St. James, beautiful in the long angled light,
circling and sweeping
                                            the giant flock a creature of one
undecided mind: wheeling under the high clouds
as the sun begins to fall
                                                       a flurry of landing and taking off again,
like an ameoba, splitting and coming back together,
spreading out to fill the sky, and then contracting to a point.

As night descends, they are gone,
to roost in the dark bare trees, to sleep.

*

Season of sedge and reed, catkin and berry.

A patch of sunlight breaks through the gray
                                                                                        illuminating the maples
with a brandy-colored light.

The grape on its pergola, twin vines arching.
Leaves redder than ever before.