4th Draft of Poem

Draft of a POEM
My friend Anny Ballardini asked me to send her a poem about autumn for her Fierlingue anthology. So here's the poem I've been revising. I hardly ever write poems. This is relatively unflowerly for me.... hope you like it and critique it, if you wish! Miles to go, usually ....


A woman in a white hat



A woman in a white hat was walking toward the end of summer.

A woman barely armed in a white dress walked through the eye of the needle of summer, removed
her white hat
and hummed a floral song.

A goat belched the last moments of summer into the woman’s ears and bleated an udderly ridiculous joke
the woman did not hear. (Animal sense is stronger than ours.)

High on the mountain, looking off as though at a parade of difficult seasons before her, dreaming of soft teal lagoons, the woman wandered
inside herself, selecting warm memories, hot flashes of love.
“I am too insubstantial for Fall and Winter.”

Someone would always appear to contradict the woman. Naturally. She recognized. Clung to herself.

High and hot with bliss at the end of summer,
the woman barely noticed the first breath of autumn.

The voice of forthcoming cool was invisible and susceptible,
a color she could not name.
She returned her white hat to her red head
too thin and the sky was a black shade of blue.
The voice was dangerous.
Well, she saw suddenly there were black dandelions on the roads.

It was an election year.

Someone on a loudspeaker said the summer had come and gone
when the woman was gazing behind her. She saw the man she wanted disappearing
in degrees
descending.

The woman shuddered.
Maybe the voice on the loudspeaker was lying.
She tried to hope.

Noting the crushed flowers on the paths, the woman sensed the end of herself
at the end of the Fall, any Fall,
felt the painful transience of adoration.
Sadness and joy were nothing she could count on: simply Samsara.
Nothing she could count on.
Nothing she could close to off.

The woman tried not to look down on the roads.
She couldn’t help bowing her head hard,
hurried home to their end to prepare for the worst,
to ward off the inevitable, wrap herself in folds of sheep.

The woman tossed her white hat into the sky and found her black hat and cape.
She flew through the mirror of herself, attempting to look carefree
to herself, freed.

I looked through the mirror and found a woman.
Saw her in many hats, many heads floating across the oceans
of my astigmatic vision.

Saw asymmetrical me dissolving inside you
disintegrating, ceasing, reforming, and rejuvenating.

Saw me inside my self dissolving, disintegrating, ceasing, reforming,
and rejuvenating.