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

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

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

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



On a pale-cast night, the moon above you
[color="white"]***[/color]Hangs, of gold, and rounded, clear of ague
As its stars are specks. 

The cold by sinew 
[color="white"]***[/color]Reaches me: "By poverty continue--sometimes"
--Says your moon, in lambent purview.