Dead Leaves the Emblems Truest (Anniversarius 11)

 

Autumn
         love the Autumn
would fill the earth with perpetual
Autumn;
         if I were rich enough
I’d follow Autumn everywhere,
paint my home in Shelley’s orange
    and brown and hectic red;
rub tincture of turning leaves
onto my own limbs to motley
    my skin into a panoply
    of hues; buy potted trees
and fill my darkened rooms with them,
inject them full of October
until I lay ankle deep in fallings
of pages more wrinkled and withered
and crisped and sere than poor Poe’s

Spring
    I salute only as birth-of-death
Summer    its ripening
Autumn    the fruit
Winter       the ice-toothed bacchanal
    of rampant death

Dead leaves the emblems truest of what we are:
cut to a rasping skeleton by time,
best in our wormwood age,
most useful to our kind
when closest to verge of nothingness.

How wise you are, detached
    at last from your origins,
borne by a wind that will not betray you,
confident, sun-singed, beyond all pain,
surging toward heaven without an enemy
    to hold you back, assured of what
is written in your own veined hand —
that you are a particle of glory returning to god.

To god? What folly! like old men whose legs
cannot support them you tumble down in heaps.
You burn in hecatombs, boots crush you to dust;
you are composted until the merest speck of you
is salt for the cannibal taproots of Spring.

Magnificent folly! For what is there at the end
of a billion misled heartbeats but this putting on
of shrouds? Should we not deck ourselves as well
as the oak tree, as maples jubilant,
or triumph-touched in willow’s gold?

I think I shall be Autumn’s minister.
Instead of those hearts torn out for the Aztec god,
I offer up a basket of leaves; instead of blood
upon the butcher block of Abraham I slay
a wreath of myrtle and laurel boughs;
upon the thirsty cross I nail a scarecrow Christ,
a wicker man with leaf-catch crown of thorns —

It was the cross itself that died for us
    the man a nobody
         a tree-killing carpenter

And folly still!
    The lightning limns the bare branch elm
 The hollow trunk howls thunder of its own
         to oust the thunder of god

The slaked storm passes, the fire-striped
         masts of the earth-ship stand.
Ear to the tree trunk, I hear the echo
         of the storm, the last tree-
         spoken words:

   I bring you glad tidings —
                     There is no god.

There is no god, and when trees speak
the storm falls back in silence, shamed
    and reprobate.
There is no god, and when trees speak
    you kill them for the truth
    you cannot bear.

 — June 14, 1981, Madison Square Park, New York City, rev. 2011.