Saturday, October 31, 2015

An October Tree Overlooks the Mississippi (2012)



An October Tree Overlooks the Mississippi

Surrounded by drying,
Half-dying leaves,
Desperate to wrest a bit more sun
To their curling bodies
Before winter hisses its frosty breath on them,
A long clutch of leaves
Holds fast to red.

Brilliant, like a Christmas sled
In a Norman Rockwell,
How could my eye
Catch sight of anything else?
It spans the length of the trunk
And reaches, reaches,
To the limits of a sky-brushing branch.

It’s as if the onset of winter
Crawls up from below,
And if it can just get high enough,
Its color won’t bleed away
Or force it to fall.

It’s like a scarlet snake,
An autumn anaconda
Slithering its way always upward.
It’s like a forgotten scarf
Beginning to slip down a coat rack,
Still clinging by its tassels.

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