Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white
roses
And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch
Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy
— Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented
And self-delighted as any ballerina,
just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is wholly autumn: in the late
Afternoon as I walked toward the ridge where the hills
begin,
There is a whir, a thrashing in the bush, and a startled
pheasant, flying out and up,
Suddenly astonished me, breaking the waking dream.
Last night
Snatches of sleep, streaked by dreams and half dreams
– So that, aloft in the dim sky, for almost an hour,
A sausage balloon – chalk-white and lifeless looking–
floated motionless
Until, at midnight, I went to New Bedlam and saw what I
feared
the most – I heard nothing, but it
had all happened several times elsewhere.
Now, in the cold glittering morning, shining at the
window,
The pears hang, yellowed and over-ripe, sodden brown in
erratic places, all bunched and dangling,
Like a small choir of bagpipes, silent and waiting. And I
rise now,
Go to the window and gaze at the fallen or falling country
— And see! — the fields are pencilled light brown
or are the dark brownness of the last autumn
— So much has shrunken to straight brown lines, thin as
the
bare thin trees,
Save where the cornstalks, white bones of the lost forever dead,
Shrivelled and fallen, but shrill-voiced when the wind
whistles,
Are scattered like the long abandoned hopes and ambitions
Of an adolescence which, for a very long time, has been
merely
A recurrent target and taunt of the inescapable mockery of
memory.
