The Pumpkined Heart (Anniversarius III)

Somewhere, the moon is red and cornstalks lean
with the wind in plucked fields. Not in New York,
city of bleached stone and desperate trees,
is my long walk of haystacks, fog in ascent,
not where traffic sings its sexless honking
can anyone mark the dim-out of frogs,
the dying-off of dragonfly wingbeats.

I am pulled up — I levitate, October-tugged,
away from the rat-doomed isle of Hudson,
clearing the water tanks and steeple-tops,
held fast on course by Orion’s glimmer,
the angry scorpion tail fast behind me.
With leaves and dust I fly to my lake shore,
to the pumpkined heart, the base and the root,
the earth I touch as pole and battery.

I love this village, though it loves not me;
remember it, though it erases me.
I mark in my life, how I bear and remember 
Octobers, and I know that a year is judged
by how it dies in these treetops: if it is burned
to cloud the eyes of men, or if it lies, burst
red in its full regale, waiting for snow,
         and the worms
and the spring, yes, to feed a new sun!

Earth, I am an ochre sheet of your leaves,
leaves more frequent than men in my lines,
leaves more fertile than mothers can be, leaves,
red, yellow, ambitious, how you have crept!
Leaves who have chilled my undraped lovers at night,
leaves sharing graveyard solemn caress with my lips,

leaves recurring everywhere to say their red gossip,
leaves for all I know returning again to this Fall,
    to this place, still blushing to recount
    how lovers were spent in their bed,
    leaves forever spelling the name of lost love!

You names that rise to my lips on October nights,
     you sleep-thieving echoes of aspirant heart,
     rise from the sealed tomb of years, drag shroud,
     where no leaves chatter nor branches impede
     dead, in the track of stalking remembrance — you
     who wake me alone in my grave, grave bed to recall
          each passionate urge from green twig.

Each, each and all have grown red, 
     defiant in the drugged fall,
denying parentage in terrible wind, 
     nonetheless breaking free,
falling to my fever in your high flame,  
     red, then wet,
moist in your somber dissent, then dry, then dead,
then in my hand the brown dust     
     that a seed should come to,
a leaf forever spelling the name of lost love!

Revised 9/6/2019.