Meditações - One clock for errands, one for midnight trysts

Backyard Georgics

It takes a calendar one damp day to declare fall,

weeks of dying mums to second the motion.

 

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Gone the homeland, gone the father, nothing left

but invisible north to magnetize your doubts.

 

                               *     *     *

 

Not eulogies or hearses but the sandwiches after,

estranged cousins chewing under one umbrella.

 

                               *     *     *

 

One clock for errands, one for midnight

trysts, though neither will hurry a slow train.

 

                               *     *     *

 

Prairie is not the floor nor sky the coffered ceiling.

Even a scarecrow is wise beyond its straw.

 

                               *     *     *

 

Look down: a river of grass. Look up: a velvet lost

and found. Look inside: no straws to drink that dusk.

 

                               *     *     *

 

A woman’s watch thieved by a jay—ah, to be lifted

like that, to be carried like time across lapping waves.

Lance Larsen