1
Now Autumn chills the treetops and the red flare
of my October is the herald of new deaths,
exciting yellow suicide-plummets,
ultimate green embraces, consummate
past tenses, the die-off of chlorophyll,
and as at gallows-side, the end of love.
So I join the flamboyant divers,
break with the past of my sun-sustenance,
and even with love. Forgetfulness, go!
Sleep is for summer nights. Awaken, now!
Inside my book the loved ones have grown thin.
They crumble at my touch, my tongue finds not
their lips nor the flush of their loins, but breaks
from them decay’s red ash, dust on the earth,
eyeless, nameless, the walked-upon past.
2
Come that downward plummet of the world
and the stone-gray sun’s last sigh,
somewhere I will be waiting at the end,
be time or age or death the house of my
endurance, I am assured of biding you.
For in the waning orbit of your life, I am
that one and only who, loving you
more than yourself, will be left by you;
but with some gravitation
more divine than will I watch your ellipse
fade, and spend my scant affections
as the dying sun warms with his own
last fire the fleeting earth.
— October 1969, New York; Rev. September 2019
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