The Law of Falling Bodies: Poems

After the Harvest, before the Snow

After the Harvest, before the Snow 1. Shadows lean deeper in the fallen light, And clouds thicken the air, as if they were Pools of frogspawn. I steer myself By the sticky grid of a spider’s web And its constellation of dead flies. 2. Should I place a windfall apple on this poem, A paperweight to keep the words From blowing away? Schiller Always wrote on a desktop, with apples Underneath the lid, inspired by The rank scent of rotting from within. 3. Fat for the sparrow, thistle for the finch— I hang from bare branches Whatever helps them stay alive, The little homebodies and the refugees. 4. Rickrack border of hostas around the house, Pinwheel dahlias, and the trellis rose— They’ve all given up, ghosts No older than the day they died. • • • 14 Only the last aster Stands against the cold, a haggard head Still struggling to hold on to Its own penitential crest. 5. In self-portraits, the artist always Hides his right hand. And what’s up The sleeve but a paintbrush, Cruel as a mirror? In the stubble and squint Of thin November, I can see My true face— The stress and the years and the weariness, New sorrows of the insoluble. 6. The jilted trees, sky of sackcloth and soot, Rain crippling the landscape— These days I could cry at anything, as though The leaves were tears for All of us brought down By folie à Dieu, The windy madness of man and God. 15 • • • 7. They say that love Drives a soft bargain in a hard time. So, tell me, In this season of fog and frost, Leaf-skid and weed-slump, where Every night’s dogged by catastrophe, Whom do I bribe To keep the future warm, Until the coming snows give way again To redbud and bloodroot And the wild hyacinth of roadside blue? • • • 16 ...