Each spring,
***When notes of old and oiled colors seen
Around the globes of tree tops, red and green
***And pink, make seeming old with newness sheen;
A waiting moment with a birdsong gleans
***The lilting echo where your sigh had been.

And in the summer come the sands, delayed,
***Now clapping at the shore with hearth hand, clayed
And soft and sweet; with open doors displayed,
***The house fronts on the hilltops stand arrayed
Like celery, and spurn the dead you made.

Reminder of an end to victory,
***The pink and orange--less perfunctory
Than spring's, and less fecund this tertiary--
***"Know, all things pass," says fall, and faithfully
I yield, to not be contradictory.

Prepare for you, I tell myself instead--
***For heavy drift that thumps and pumps the dead
With snow; and white and black and yellow dread
***That asks aloud if really life has fled
Or if
***A kind of cancer.



On a pale-cast night, the moon above you
***Hangs, of gold, and rounded, clear of ague
As its stars are specks.

The cold by sinew
***Reaches me: "By poverty continue--sometimes"
--Says your moon, in lambent purview.