In Chill November

There is a day in November, when you walk in the woods (here, it is Pittsburgh's vast Frick Park), when you see a great stand of leafless trees, and, at a distance, you cannot tell if they have lost their leaves, or if they were dead already. How could you tell? This revised poem comes from that quandary.

IN CHILL NOVEMBER

The leaves be red,

The nuts be brown,

They hang so high

They will not fall down.

—Elizabethan Round, Anon.

The snow has come.

The leaves have fallen.

Long nights commit the chill

low sun and flannel clouds cannot disperse.

We walk the park, stripped now

     to mere schematics,

vision drawn out to farther hills

now that the forest is blanked

like flesh turned glass on X-ray negative.

These woods are sham so near the solstice,

play out a murder mystery of birch and maple.

The riddle is, who’s dead and who’s pretending?

That witches’ elm with clinging broomsticks —

     is it deceased or somnolent?

Which of these trees will never bloom again:

     A Lombardy poplar stripped by blight—

     A maple picked clean by gypsy moths —

     A thunder-blasted pedestal of ash —

     A moribund sycamore whose only life

          came in a few vain buds

          (growing like dead men’s hair and nails,

          slow to acknowledge the rot below)?

The ground’s a color cacophony,

     alive, alive!

the treeline a study in gray and brown.

So, who can tell

     the bare tree from the dead,

     the thin man from the skeleton?

Which denizens of wood-lot shed these leaves?

Which is a corpse? a zombie?

Which one is but a vermin shell?

Which treads the night on portable roots,

festooned with bats,

sinking its web of trailing vines

into the veins of saplings?

Which stalwart oaks will topple,

which trunks cave in to termite nests?

Which is the next victim of carpenter ants?

How can we tell the living from the dead?

It is just the month: November lies.

October always tells the truth.

You could no more fake

the shedding of leaves

than simulate a pulse in stone.

Only the living fall in love,

only the living cry for joy,

only the living relinquish that month

in red and yellow shuddering!

The pines,

those steeple-capped Puritans,

what price their ever-green?

Scrooge trees, they hoard their summers,

withhold their foliage,

refuse to give the frost his due.

Ah, they are prudent,

Scotch pine and wily cedar,

touch-me-not fir and hemlock.

They will live to a ripe old age

(if you can call that living).

I shun this sham Novembering.

Turn back the calendar: there, Halloween,

no, further back to the start of leaf-fall!

There! The first-frost autumn shuddering!

Love! Burn! Sing! Crumble!

Dance! Wind! Fall! Tumble!

Into the wind-blown pyramid of leaves!

Spin in a whirling dust-devil waltz!

Leaf-pile! Treetops! Tramping on clouds!

Weightless, flying, red-caped October!