In September


1. 
On the first day back after their 
chrysalis summer freshly hatched 
adolescents check each other out,
saucer-eyed as they apprehend why.
Some fold their innocence up because it’s 
precious, more from shame.  In annealing 
souls irresistible nature rubs up 
against immovable culture 
and thus the art of secrecy is born.

2.
Empire turned the seventh into the ninth
month, but among us Anglophones
hardly anyone can remember--
without invoking November’s thirty--
how many days there are in September.

3.
Some will smell the banished brume of burning leaves,
the skinned-pig aromas of a Sixties afternoon.

4.
Classrooms, parking lots, stadiums and news 
are vacant no more.  When it’s finished even
the longest, lightest summer dims like a dream.

5.
What could be more bracing than hearing the last
heat wave break on the far shore of October?

6.
Reality reasserts itself 
as the body cedes sway hesitantly
to the mind.  Hope hugs anxiety 
while late-bloomers patiently 
spruce up their business plan.

7.
The gravity of mid-February
deliquesced in the fug of late July.
Will this be the year when I’m found out at last?

8.
Sobrieties of the season:
Inconsequence takes a turn to earnestness.
Plein-air farce darkens to bedroom tragedy.
Serious wool displaces insouciant twill.

9.
With the chopped-off butts of children’s drawn-out 
holidays some adults condole, recollecting 
even what they cannot remember, how 
it feels for time to stretch out like a 
cat for a protracted nap, then, savagely
roused, the shocked yowls and sudden claws.

10.
The Gentiles won’t respect you if you don’t 
go.  No school today, explained my entirely 
unmetaphysical mother.  It always 
seemed to be over ninety, humid as 
a peddler’s underarm, the synagogue 
braising High-Holy-Day Jews jammed into 
boughten seats.  Days of Awe, there’s a 
phrase even an agnostic can’t outbrave.  
The pious were there too, serene, not 
deigning to observe that of days the 
most high and holy is any Sabbath.

11.
Take heart from renewal though cringing at 
the strain; don’t weigh the burden, only lift.
It can be a good month, as Trilling says, 
before aspiration collides with effort,
a honeymoon of tentativeness,
a congeries of inchoate faces,
of muscles settling under a load,
a fumbling among chrysanthemums,
new footwear, old faces,
early classes and late leaves.

“In September” first appeared in Folly Magazine.




Lighten Up Sonnet


The pleasure life insists on, its gladness 
and frenzied fumbling, might almost provoke 
anyone to crack a smile, even you,
so willfully cross while drizzle dapples 
forsythia and the privets glisten
like palisades.  It’s perverse to give up not 
just hope but hope for yourself below
two brace of stout suburban oaks bowed
like a quartet of chthonic-footed crones 
wiggling toes under this dance floor of lawn.
Aren’t you a wee bit tempted to boogie 
past the cool stone birdbath, beneath those trees 
that look so wise, to sniff the lavender 
ceding its blue scent to the bumblebees?