Equinox 2

Fall Equinox She reminded me of you— the girl, today, who played croquet, inspired to flight the lifeless leaves flushed with her free laughter—crushed beneath the skipping globe cutting straight the path to the goal.

I was sure—you were here—as good cheer curled my lips and unfurled my brow in a rush of russet locks—did the leaves deny it? They charged a tumble along the pavement, thrust with the vortex spirit that spurts and spills the fluids of men and sadistic sedans that eviscerate them—leaking liver through reeking loins, gnashing blood-livid with justice, or green as beardless corpses mired in a stagnant pool: indifferent, in the end, lying as one unrecognized—unrecognizable—stripped of face, family and rank with the belly-juices of twitching rodents

emboldened by the license of silence; then swallowed in quickening darkness, coiled to sprout this time of year, that hides each festering harvest from the fallowed eyes of future generations: who feed by roots buried in this soil. And nurse on the breeze, wafting light through easy branches, tickling drooping buds to yawn in dew-drunk draughts of morning her neck might yet revive your eyes suddenly—her eyes suddenly betrayed by the yellow sun slipping through slits in cement horizons and the trees—the trees too seemed to gape in half belief, splintered by cold like wizened old men who clasp their knees in front of mirrors and wait for spring—whose reach exceeds its grasp. They cling to wind-shorn flowers of youth, shake their yellow tales

stale with rage: gray remains of ruddier six-by-eight-inch memories, crumbling into the pallor of the skyless season, or clogging an empty sink. And faceless widows who tear at empty lapels, cursing ash that won’t relight under the business of the street, or nuzzle scalped roses, draining fragrance white into vinyled parlors, soap-sterile as they shrivel—(almost imperceptibly). But slithering fog curled about the shivering neck of the field unnoticed, squeezing hysterical flailing of sudden realization numb into listless resignation—fists buckled, breathless and purpled, as they will— she finally turned— as I realized my mistake in her unfamiliar face, the clutch of my flapping coat and steady execution of the rake (and a glimpse of what’s at stake)— as her hands smooth the dead into blankets of snow, I know

it was you—then her breath clouds the lamps and the gray seals black