Autumn Elegy (An Experiment)

Written at Edinboro PA in middle of the Vietnam War ...

The snow has come. The swirling flakes self-immolate on hot maple grove, white-fringe the aging auburn oaks, a coin drop from winter into the glacial lake. (Cold comes so early here — September frost invades the harvesting and gives the roses heart attacks.) The boreal wind has taken up residence,  has seized the calendar in icy clench.

The hat I haven’t seen since spring comes down —I undertake a day-long search for hibernating gloves and boots. My scarf has stolen off — I know not where. The mouse, the gray one my cat keeps catching and letting go, darts to and fro on the kitchen floor — does he know the hard light’s reckoning? Does bone-deep chill at dawn embolden him this once for daylight foraging? (We have an arrangement on the winter’s supplies:  he comes out at night and he and I know full well that whatever is not locked is not wanted, fair game for a gray mouse.) He nudges a cast-off crust,  noses for crumbs, his whiskers italicizing the advent of hunger, his tail a question mark interrogating me about the wayward sun.

Alone in frost, I take my place at the lake, my solitude complete, my steps the first to break the pathway to the pebbled shore. I stand alone, until the rabbit peers out from the graveyard grass — twice now he’s been there among the mummied lilies, his eye, as mine, upon the never-placid waves.

The summer boats are gone. White ducks that waded here are huddled now beneath the bridge, far downstream. The other birds have packed their bags — they have left us their broken shells, their desolated nests, their songs a carbon copy of a twice-repeated tale.  

Lord Lepus, what do you know of impending ice? Do you suspect the cirrus-borne snow’s arrival? Will you find greens enough beneath the snow bank?

We turn our mutual ways — you to your warren amid the husks and roots and toppled gravestones — I must go to book and breakfast. I leave the trees, fond frame of my eye’s delight, putting behind me the cup of lake that always welcomes each sunrise. Soon now its eye will be blinded, a cataract reflecting sheet-white nothingness.

I walk through town, across the college grounds where last night’s wind’s caprice made here a pristine bed of snow — yet over there an untouched riot of maple on still-green lawn. The carillon tolls the beginning of the day; the students hurry, dumbfounded at virgin snow.

I am the only one to linger here. I stand  upon a carpet of red, soft, ancient leaves: some, some are green yet, they are still proud, they are fallen on the wings of their youth and they are going to pick up anytime now and fly back —

I am mourning for them, for them, for you, for my brothers who have fallen.