Draft of a POEM

My friend Anny Ballardini asked me to send her a poem about autumn for her Fierlingue anthology. So here's what I've managed to write today. 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

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 breathed the last moments of summer into the woman’s ears and bleated an udderly ridiculous joke the woman did not hear. (Animal sense is wiser 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.

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 head to her head too thin and the sky was a black shade of blue. The voice was dangerous. Well, she noticed 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 disappear beneath waves of heat. 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 any Fall, felt the painful transience of adoration. Sadness and joy were nothing she could count, or was . . .. Samsara. Nothing she could count on. Or off.

The woman had tried not to look down on the roads. She couldn’t help bowing her head hard and hurried home to the end of the roads “to prepare for the worst, to ward off the inevitable, to wrap her self up in wool.”

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 the woman, saw her in many hats floating across the oceans of my vision. Saw myself dissolving inside you, inside me, disintegrating, ceasing, reforming, and rejuvenating. Saw myself inside myself dissolving, disintegrating, ceasing, reforming, and rejuvenating.





(copyright, yes of course)