Time Enough
Sept 28 2013


There should be pretty girls
encircled in their arms,
sailors stealing kisses
illicit feels.

Or the home team
in Cadillac cars
in a blizzard of ticker tape,
drunk
on victory.

Delirious leaves
in the first big wind of fall,
burnished yellows and rusts
in swirling curtains, and gusts
funnelling up
in wind-spouts,

filling the air
like confetti, from pent-up fans.
Or from the weary masses

done with war.
In a windy blast
in a single day
all the trees laid bare.

Fall came, and went
like a victory parade;
returning men
thrilled to be alive,
all the girls

ecstatic.
Time enough
to remember fallen friends
in the winter of discontent
the morning after.

The trees have turned,
exhausted limbs

stripped clean.
Next week
I will rake up spent and crumpled leaves,
put them to rest
unmarked
in neatly spaced piles.

Fall is short here, and the colours unspectacular. So a big wind -- like today -- is pretty much enough to turn the soft beauty of fall into skeletal trees and crumpled leaves.

The gusting leaves looked like a storm of confetti, except that the crucial celebration was missing. The scene needed that iconic picture of the anonymous soldier and girl kissing in the street on V-E day; or the New York Yankees waving from the seat backs of 1950s Cadillac convertibles, parading down the canyons of Wall St in a blizzard of ticker tape.

This image of an exhausted population in the aftermath of war led me to the bitter-sweetness of fall: the death of leaves; the coming of winter. Like the drunken bacchanal of these public celebrations, there if often a dark undercurrent beneath the beauty and joy.

The hard part was having the poem take this dark turn. Too sudden or too dark, and it would seem false; or even emotionally manipulative. I hope the bit of foreshadowing, and the way the poem dips in a toe and then back out, helps to soften the turn; helps make it seem natural, if not inevitable. And that the mounds of leaves resembling unmarked graves is not too heavy-handed.