September
*Anna Dostoevsky


You admire the murmurs that do not sift
one sun to another: live, dismiss. Rooms
enclose houses: everywhere brittleness.
Doors are hardening to an altitude
of writing; this place, persistence, mirrors,
brown roads, buttercups, vivid pink aster,
cherries under a cliff, you- when summer
stills all chant. 

                   To stir subtle vanishings,
late month quivers, generic birds, too soon
a steadfast touch is knowing the grim passings
of last September.

                         You remember how
delightful it was to walk quickly, for fun
(with our being taller than stems of flowers).
Escaped things of this world,
                                      O, how are we young?

Weary you are, when the weather is full.
Will your self seem slighted, smaller than life
size? You are fearing, and dream known places
that clouds circle around. It rains in faces.
Translucent–looking and elliptical,
enormous how these beads fall in glazes.
Undisturbed by nests in the garden, weeds
will outlive us; envious, we will see the sky
shift from inside those harmonic spaces. 
Have you ever seen the snow in April
trees? Festivals adream, dancing. I am with
you. The wind endures shadow. You and I will
too. Surface, upturn the earth. Is everyone
calm and basking, whispering in the sun?

 

Copyright © 2003 Jessica Schneider