Denouement

The plot of the seasons thickens.
It is the day the leaves
have begun their descent in earnest,
their pirouetting through the air
sets the stage for the death dance
fervor of Fall. It is dusk.

The horses are plunging
into one another and stampeding
through pastures, kicking up mud.
Season of the slanted light.
The last pink rays throw every tendon,
every liquid-moving muscle,
into contrast. And suddenly
they see me, stultified, and become
statues, gaping in high grasses.

There are too many species
of birds crossing the sky to count.
In ones, in flocks of hundreds.

My own flock of fowl refuses
the nightly ceremony
of procession
from field to coop. They line up
in their row of nine,
ready to be shepherded,
but the moths are too much, rising up
out of the foliage, and the birds go wild
in the chase, and then the puddles
are too much, and then everything
is too much.

Loneliness:

It is one thing to endure the days
in pain with no witness.
Animal eyes suffice.

It is worse to endure beauty, alone.
To be the only set of human eyes
watching the evening perish,
as the land perishes,
as the earth slowly perishes,
as the body slowly perishes,
taking all it has seen with it.

© Jennie Wrisley 2010