In the Fall of the Year (St. Stephen’s Track)

1969

One night two decades in the past Atlanta’s sometimes skyline through the trees a fall night came down cold. To speak blind fever to the young one in a yard of leaves and grass, words as passion’s sign and never touch her–still today I feel the loss; I feel her softness.

Now she recalls a later lake when I see a forest glowing there and her skin beneath a blouse –so crowded in a car but hardly caring. Although by phone she says those days she wasn’t looking further than the lake shore, no desire for a teenage turmoil not her own.

Understood–acknowledged–think you’re wrong. For what was left to carry into winter but those quick words and yearnings for the future still before us? carried all this while–soft memories glow.

If we never shared a bed of leaves or cramped quarters of a car that heat would never burn more than these words or gusty winds to fill our dreams.

In those days I warned her silent with my heart –I could not speak–she could not hear what urgency was held grown thinner with repeating like a voice in air around a corner, down some street and fast receding. 

Such randomness of fortune or willful chords yanked blindly like a carnival performance with the puppet staring dumbly into multi-colored scenes of crowds and lovers                 who would shift him from a cloud and sky-full evening again to whirlwinds and desire.

But a quiet grows around me like an absence of the winds, a stillness like the distance from the turmoil of this year. Stand and watch the hues change over St. Stephen’s track, the light of God and crows that charge the trees, breathing my own life and tasting fall’s return.

1990

Next to the last poem in the book Ilene published, it was written sometime after she’d found me–still struggling, still confused, except the poem was addressing her. With gentle edits.