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J. D. McClatchy (1945– ) Late Autumn Walk From inside nothing is plausible But the need for change. Leafing Through the backcountry’s paisley Ups and downs sways anyone out For a spin, flamboyants thrilling The air, a breath of which leaves One lightheaded with their conceits Whose bare, forked facts of life Will be raked against a winter sky. Or, steaming behind the kitchen window, To watch a solid week of drizzle Targeting the pond, tapping out On oak-leaf clusters monotonous Ultimatums some have challenged, Some accept. The wildings drop. Sumacs flare in spiky disarray. By November, it all comes clear, And yesterday’s mild invitation Drew me outdoors—past the pond, The pasture, into the gully and brake Whose angry dyes a frost had left As nutskin, tobacco, cider, plum. Ankle-deep in that ruined spring, I faltered over its drypoint details. Echoes of woodsmoke. Milky pods. A seed, as if in flight, paddling Through squinting pools of light Down the air’s deepening current. One of the maple’s thousand hands, Velveteen cysts tooled on its palm, Its veins the trace of a character Meaning both “fall” and “prefer.” 196 gArnet poems An odd momentum kept me going On toward Sleeping Giant, its easy Sloping neck and chin stubbled With pine and birch. I’d climbed Before—who hasn’t?—to the sheer Rockface lookout they call The Eye, Known, if by any sense, then a sixth, For vistas that yield to nothing less Than blind insight. And yesterday I stood there like a staff, saw The whole valley dipped in a cool Pearl-blurred solution, a glaze over The gap where the city must have been, Its edges strewn along a new aura, The least particular now hovering, not Settling in the globe I carried home. ...

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