Autumn and Age

by Greg Van Hee

Autumn came last night--

a raucous middle-aged harlot

garishly gowned in red and orange,

her cold fingers killing

green warmth wherever she touched,

her cynical to-hell-with-you attitude

laughing at summer’s last weak defenses,

but her heavily painted face

could not hide the wrinkles.

I used to love her cool promenade:

in her transient visits, so much promised,

but she always opened doors rushing in,

stayed a short while and didn’t bother

closing them on the way out.

I’ve learned to see her sudden aging,

to feel death in her casual caresses,

to despise the insincerity of her

brief gestures of momentary reprieves--

false promises of a Phoenix

soon to die in icy white ashes.

No longer her masquerades beguile me:

now I understand her futile pretenses

and how they mock my own preoccupation--

the desperate self-delusion

about age as a matter of the mind.

Black Fall

by

Greg Van Hee

Up North black is the final color of fall:

it whirs in a dark cloud of birds heading South;

swirls in a circle of crows over the carcass of summer;

swarms in a flotilla of coots across the lake’s last blue.

Last night a storm of gold fell in the night,

crashing to cover the green and brown in a carpet

of rattling, restless leaves moved by a cold wind,

leaving the shivering branches black against the sky.

And always lurking like a gaunt impervious priest

to perform an inevitable ritual of Last Rites,

Winter waits to wrap the corpse of another season

in a blank swaddling of unfeeling white.

So the World gripped without pity in winter’s

relentless, cold hands

struggles to keep in its benumbed heart and mind

memories of an oh so distant resurrection.