Poetry

...8 November 1991:641...

...POEMS Anne Porter Scott's Elegy Some of the leaves Are falling early But there are glinting Dragonflies And the brown honeybee Searches about In the surviving roses Flock after lilting flock The birds are leaving They ebb away Out of the dotted sky We watch them out of sight The air Is drained of summer We're left behind With apple-scented nights With carillons of crickets With planets bright As the Nativity And this new air Whose coolness is itself A kind of fragrance And now The earth breathes out The unearthy blossoms Of the autumn crocus Around the tool shed door...

...Before t h e Frost These are the nights When every cricket sings When in the dark around us There is a flowering Jubilant continuous Festival of crickets They sing together all night long Drawing a pulsing Chiming joy Out of the dryness Of their tiny bodies The sky Is black and clear tonight The mountain village of the stars Glitters in silence But in the trilling crickets Among the autumn grasses The stars Have found their voices...

...Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake I watched them As they neared the lake They wheeled In a wide arc With beating wings And then They put their wings to sleep And glided downward in a drift Of pure abandonment Until they touched The surface of the lake Composed their wings And settled On the rippling water As though it were a nest...