Autumn in Three Parts
1.
I thought it an amazement to walk there.
Does the path through marshland form
a tunnel of cicada sound, an echo-hole
through Joe Pye weed, goldenrod, vervain,
the last green of sedges, reeds, cattails?
Now it seems more of the same business
of earth, trying to seduce me into living.
When at night, the cricket’s note, solitary, forlorn,
in darkness—a question of how much I can trust.
2.
Nothing speaks to me.
And I speak to nothing.
Even the blue jay does not shriek,
silent somewhere in the first cold dawn.
I want time to stop, in this cold dawn,
and leave the frozen dew on the grass blades.
All my troubles should pause, look
in the mirror of morning—and reconsider.
3.
Time goes by. And the world.
And all the terribles. All the terribles.
Even the worst someday ceases to be.
I never write when I am happy.
When I am happy, what need
has the world for my poems—
When I am happy, a yellow gourd,
set upon a table, a yellow gourd
in October is more than all my poems.
And all the terribles, their bluster and yowl—
they come back, they go, then they come.
Like wind in October, terrible wind.
Blowing the last yellow leaf off each tree.
Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Read more.