Walker Creek: November

Now swift swallows have flown for the winter.
The last pears have fallen.
Maples, huddled close in the swamp,
slip off their leaves
and lay bare the shaggy cliffwall.
Twigs in damp tangles under
the sagging grasses
abandon themselves to rot,
food for beetles.
Hardiest of their generation, the wry apples
clutch at their gnarled twigs
as long as the wind will let them.

The sumac’s crimson seedpods cringe
while the air unleashes the first
fast rangers of milkweed.
Under the deep beeches
in leafmold crevices
autumn phalluses
rise up in a single night from
forgotten woodpiles.
The screech of a bluejay batters
naked oak trunks, scattering
bleached goldfinches
wherever they cluster on thistles.
The junco’s tail flashes
in the cedar. He sings
of two pebbles chipping against one another.

Toppling grasses and unsteady leaves
tolerate the chickadee’s scramble
through the drowsy apertures of autumn
toward the house
whose chimney sighs gray woodsmoke
and panes of glass smile earlier each evening.
Roots hunch and contract, their blood runs thin.
They hold forearms
stiff against the wind, while
castaway stones
plunge fistlike for winter
into the ground’s graveled belly.

Sighing, chuckling, the minnow-busy
creek’s summer-warm tides,
heartheat of the sea,
steam and scurry.
The thatch of the marsh holds hard:
it crouches down on matted fibers
to quake at air but yield its seed to water.
Come January, grumbling glaciers
will walk uphill in the arms
of northeast gales to shear
a year’s marsh hay
and macerate against the granite
piers of the bridge
the buried shells of snails.

Moles burrow down to the frostline.
Starlings hang on in holes
hard-won from woodpeckers.
Squirrels, walled up between
skyscrapers of hickory nuts (all
stolen except for a handful
of windfalls wrapped in their husks)
duck down under the barn.

Snow is coming. Snow
is coming. All but birds
will be buried. Water will
absent itself till spring
while earth locks up into its mineral meaning.
Only yesterday we breathed a world
of liquor and seed. It hardens now.
The little animals lie panting,
sleepless, winterless,
anticipating drift and flake,
awaiting the creak of snow beneath the paw-cushions,
the crackle of frozen meat
upon the tongue. Their lungs
bloom like flowers
at the alienation of the air.