Autumn Choice
Now just russet oaks and those leaves
Indian red smolder among the woods’
dwarf pines and bare maples. Of all
the myriad summer songs just a few notes
make plain the silence. Elsewhere autumn
feeds into winters’ fevers on urban streets:
crowds surge, windows glow with all
we think we need: all can be bought, and all
seems endlessly reborn.
I am torn between
the hectic surge and the root that hoards
its strength in silence. Tonight as the season’s
first nor-easter prowls around the house
and strips the forest clean and drowns all song
with its howls, I choose an end to each season:
I don’t believe fever on fever equals life.
A man needs the slow down and ingathering
of his power to defy winter with another spring
however the years blow past.
Lance Lee is a past Creative Writing Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, and expects Elemental Natures, a selected prose and poetry, his seventh book of poetry, this fall. He publishes widely in both the UK and US: he lives in Los Angeles, with family too in London