A Spot

Walking in the autumn woods, resigned
To leaving such rusticity behind,
The leaves around me lit
With all their urban opposite,
The wood’s traditional fall showing
Heightened by its coming going,
I reach a high place on the ridge,
The afternoon and evening’s bridge,
On one side endless dips and hills
That the dying amber sunset fills
With colors only seconds past,
While on the other, simulcast
Of co-existing autumn night
Stretching almost out of sight.

Wistfully I engineer
My own borderline frontier
Between continuing this distant work
And a dinner at Le Cirque,
Lying on the mossy scree
To watch the wildlife watching me:
My current stupor stupefying
A marmot motionless with spying,
Both of us surrounded by the pink
That days make when they crisply sink,
Interlaced with the infinite light green
Of evening’s bottomless routine,
Clouds balloon-like flecks of paper
Rolling in the red-tipped vapor.

It’s not as vast as outer space,
My isolated mountain base,
With its tiny patch of beaten wheat
Signaling an elk’s retreat,
Its bit of wilderness as small
As the beginnings of the fall,
Into which the night air weaves,
For good effect, some rotting leaves,
And in fact could be a sidewalk square
That three grudging walkers share,
So slight a pie with so few slices
That no one’s portion quite suffices,
But out here in the lavish rough
My own displacement is enough.

April 8th, 2005