At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit up this early poem, "October 1967" from The Pumpkined Heart. We all thought the world was coming to an end soon. The Vietnam War divided the country. People were threatening "hippies" with violence. In this "nature poem," written amid the violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, about the remembered lake and the carillon music from the bell tower, I felt the isolation and anxiety. 
Edinboro State College's carillon bells (real or a recorded) could be heard from afar. I remember going to class hearing "Musetta's Waltz," and coming out of class in the dark hearing Anton Rubinstein haunting melody, "Kammenoi Ostrow." The memory of the Rubinstein music against a fall-winter horizon bleak enough to be Russian, stayed with me.
Now I have rewritten this and added some current allusions, so that it is of 2018, although 95% of the poem is my 20-year-old voice speaking with the trees.  This poem had been excluded from my Anniversarius autumn cycle, but this revision is now counted as part of that grouping. [Revised and expanded again, May 2019.]

ANNIVERSARIUS 44:
AT THE LAKE'S EDGE

by Brett Rutherford

Scorched by the blind frost, the maple leaves are dead,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag, or they are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of identity,
chopped to mulch for next year's garden.


Bird flocks rise in arrow-shaped vectors,
riding the west winds up to escape us.
Leaves fall; they flee.


While all this leaf-holocaust
this flight-to-south abandonment
by nations of birds goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps cornstalk
and the irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?


Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through tree-bared acres 
to the dark line of leaden pines,
mark how the shadows grow bold in the slanting dusk
(it is a warning!), mark how the wind
now sighs like one who cannot be consoled
by hopes about the coming election. Death
weaves through the browning, rigid cat tails.
Bored, they lean sere and childless
by the drained swamp; soon their roots
will meet a gravel barricade, soon
water drained, a concrete wall no seed
can scale, nor root circumference.


The blasted oak wears its dead leaves
as a stubborn beard, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers
wait like mastodons at glacier-edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.
You and I are not part of them, and a third 
of the insects are already gone.)


From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kammenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.
I go to the shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,
sere fathers as old as any gravestone here.
A few leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a defiant dust-devil.
They will return with me
to join my curiosity cabinet
of preserved loves, gelled moments.

Autumn is not and never will be
an ending. Autumn piled on itself
is a bottomless leaf-pile. Plunge in!
Stand here amid the dying bell-tone,
as wind that tasted tundra slaps
your face awake with icy needles.
Kammenoi Ostrow fades to silence.

Where does one make a stand for life?
There is nothing north of you,
and little cause to bird-flee southward.
This is the edge of the world.
This is where the first snow falls.

Subjects: Edinboro, Kammenoi Ostrow, autumn poems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC8ah61cMNw