Memory of Summer

Bruce F. Murphy

The wind comes empty-handed
out of the north, and for the first time in weeks
I see the birches,
awakened, white, drawn tight
into their bark, except here and there
where roughened by the deer's scumbling.
Aloft the trees' clattering
puts me in mind of boys
but it's only the bare-headed wind.
Does chaos have a point,
the unlearning that almost kills us
before we've even had a chance
to know it? It must be gone now,
to let such time be spent
choosing among forms to say it in
beyond make it stop. How do I know
there's a soul that, like evergreens
in the cold dark snow, keeps alive
a memory of summer?
On a half-tormented day
I see that something must have
brought me through. I tag along,
the hunter and the fox
he kills: something escapes
the intimacy of one's desire to live,
the other's to torture and to kill.
Something in winning always lost,
as something in loss
is kept, and in dying, lives.
We are all going away.
Our voices are like
barking on a far hill.
To live is to burn to live.