All This October.

by Bruce Pratt

All this October day I am a tacking human sloop,
in eye-dusted, hair-taunting wind,
bell-banging tongues of spindrift yawing
in corrupted yawps of cawing crows,
a soft sun peaked in parching shadow,
and I gulp the distance journeyed
from finger stiff mittens and head high drifts,
crowding sword-pointed pickets,
to this creaky-jointed spume of memories
more heroic than they were.

All another October running day, I reposed in shriven leaves,
beneath white clots of child-drawn clouds,
dreaming shelves of summer-prisoned bell jars of
stewed rhubarb, tart crabapple jams,
that cradled sneezy whiffs of dead summer
sterilized in blanched bean and pea,
with bursts of sugar cached in stripped kernels
of sweet corn and August’s reluctant raspberries,
to be savored when February’s drift tunneling gales
howled through clapboard and lath.

All that October day rasping in ragweed riots,
gasping and wheezing in goldenrod hack,
I sprinted the road home from school, coat trailing from
my waist in frost-killing afternoon sun,
my shadow a deranged, scuttling crab, geese veeing
south in sky bullying banter and squawk,
passing grasshopper-singing fields and autumn’s shriveled brooks
whose trout had darted downstream into the
dream-spackled river of deep, rock-cooled pools.

All that October day racing through leaf-shedding orchards,
sneakers squashing shrunken, bee-gored drops,
keening the dead summer as the sirens of awakening ache
surged and pestered my ears, and nascent scents
of the whispered promises of coitus cauled in my child’s wonder,
I tumbled boy-over-dog spent into the frost-browned grass,
nosing the earth for her musk, a child seeking an engorged nipple,
delirious penitent’s pain delicious in its alien tang,
an afternoon of a day of no end and chilling night and
call of barred owl and clacking branches.

All that October day I did not consider final things, unable
to yet imagine the flash of a perfectly sinewed thigh,
a memory locked later in a feral, sun-scoured, morning field
quaking like Abraham’s hammering heart,
skeins of carping disquietude unable to hobble the rising sap,
slaying fear in prayerful equivocation, birthing
an eternal addiction, born in bone, fired in flesh,
flaring, untempered, and unrepentant,
generous, annealing wandering hearts in flawless purpose.

All this October day ambling up the eye-cauterizing ridge
past the fulcrum of four score and ten,
up nearer to the cloud bereft sky, a middle-aged gait
and thoughts rumpling into snarls of questions that
the child can afford to store in the place where things to
be done later are laid down for a nap,
until the Gnostic wind flutes into the ear the sound of
footfalls, swish of scything grass, and
memory punishes the heart like a sandstorm.