Private Autumn

" bio cortado"

fee sie ad,

Drinking the orange sun in cloudy cider

while the pub-fire frets like a firework in the hearth,

I wonder what you with your head of a coiffed chrysanth

would make of October in the Public Gardens.

Autumn's fan-painting of the afternoon

hung like a frieze of flowers from the lawn's blue misty edge.

Still on their mast-firm stalks the sun-spot blossoms

were warm as pineapples in a drunk man's dream -

ramparts of ripeness - and tawny weeping trees

were beautiful titians with ruined cliffs of hair.

Behind the aviary wire strut tropical birds

whose match-fire crests spurt into golden flame,

whose tongues screech out with the tearing sound of tin,

while the drinking fountain piddles on its stone.

Deciduous evening: coldness and shadows come;

the leaves that lie on the lake are the tarnished scraps

of chocolate-paper scattered in picnic summer...

Iron spikes of railings chill with the coming of snow.

A light goes on in a window across the way,

and like an inverted lily the house floats up

with its head and its hands entangled in cables of weed.

They have rung the closing-bell, and the day closes.

The falling coals suggest the fall of fruit

in quiet gardens; apples among the grass,

pitted with grottoes of tipsy stumbling wasps.

How rich the earth is, and how poor am I,

hearing the echoes of your absent voice,

racy as cooking-sherry; who once lay,

polished, compact, and altogether new

as a red horse-chestnut in the hands of a child,

exposed in Time's own palm while I passed on.