Again, September
where the leaves begin their long surrender
and I hold fast to every before and after.
Above me, a cacophony of geese, recycling their
rites of spring, fashion themselves into a lopsided
victory sign, sticking their faith in the future's eye,
and I salute them, metaphorically at least.
Remember when poetry was something that happened to you,
when it pierced you through and through and through?
When it kissed your knees and encased you in light?
An apple of Newton’s, God’s own Eureka!
Of course you do, and I’m happy—
so pitifully glad to be a part of the mad, happy dance—
yet there’s something to words that makes one a surgeon,
prone to the dissection and rearranging of miracles.
So that even as sunshine slides down my sleeve
and empties my pocket of gold and debris,
a part of the self hangs back, detached,
making of the present a more beautiful past.
“It was different back then,”
but the difference is in the remembering,
as we stuck each moment like buddhas on pogo sticks,
so Zen we thought eternity could be numbered in
the days before Christmas.
Players on an infant stage, not knowing such
scenes would grow heavier with replay,
we ignored the warning in our grandparents' examples
—bodies bird-light, faces sharpened into arrows—
backs bowed over with layers of sediment.
Is it possible the phoenix looks to us for inspiration?
We are the only backward-looking, forward-driven creatures of nature
and autumn is our renewable feast, a creaky time machine set on ache
one more chance for the leaves to scatter
so we might leap backward and fore, transitioning
forever, into our piles of lukewarm nostalgia, waiting to
see where the colors will land so we may jump
again
