Autumn Wood

[rejectomorph]

Bright afternoon dons the gray shroud of evening, but night casts it aside to run naked, its bareness unseen in darkness. The arching sky is pinned in place by stars. A bird, its sleep disturbed by my passage, rustles a bush. Colder and colder, the breeze rises. I hear dead leaves scrape the pavement, dying leaves brush one another, filling the night with clicks. Some of the pines whisper, some of the pines moan, some of the pines wail.




Belated Sunday Verse

Coleman Valley Road

by Gerald Stern


This is where I had my sheep vision,
in the brown grass, under the stars.
I sat there shivering, fumbling with my paper,
losing tobacco. I was a spark at the most,
hanging on to my glasses, trying to hide
from the wind. This is how I bent

my head between my knees, the channels and veins
pumping wildly, one leg freezing, one leg
on fire. That is the saxophone
and those are the cymbals; when it gets up here
the roar of the waves is only a humming, a movement
back and forth, some sloshing we get used to.

That is my cello music and those are my headlights
making tunnels in the grass; those are
the clouds going down and those are the cliffs going out.
I am reaching up. I think I have
a carp's face, I have a round nose
and a large red eye and a ragged white mustache.

The strings are stretched across the sky; one note
is almost endless—pitiless I'd say—
except for the slight sagging; one note is
like a voice, it almost has words, it sings
and sighs, it cracks with desire, it sobs with fatigue.
It is the loudest sound of all. A shrieking.