Yearn

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.

"Aubade," Philip Larkin

A rare word with the year

in it, though it doesn't get

pronounced, unlike the ought

in autumn that, at your back,

you always hear. Though you do

hear the urn, or the eam,

which is not what you deserve, maybe,

or want, but just what you get,

like the truer blue

and deeper green of the shorter days,

the trees draining to their true colors,

which have been beautifully, though perhaps

uselessly, there all along, like the year

in my earth or awfully early.

Surely more poems have been written

about this season than any other,

poets being by nature, and that's where

they say they like to live,

morbid, which almost has more

in it, and certainly orb.

And bid, which is never high

enough, and is always right

before goodbye.