Dispersal
Summer was immense (says Rilke)
and I’ve had my fill of it too, ready
for the down-driving force of Fall
to send creatures into burrows,
leaves to the ground, and seeds
deeper (Shelley says) each
like a corpse within its grave,
but then the milkweed pods crack open
and things are airborne again,
the doubtful sky filled with
silk-floss umbrellas, and it’s like that kid
in the 6th-grade band who was never
in sync with the beat, blowing
for all he was worth just after
the music had died down,
but there was a kind of glory in it,
the heedless blare,
how the bell of his horn tilted
so conspicuously, contrarianly skyward.
ANN LAUINGER’s three books are Persuasions of Fall (U. of Utah), which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry, Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree), and Dime Saint, Nickel Devil (Broadstone Books). Read more.