October is my favorite month. It’s full of orange and decay and warm spice. We begin to hunker down and get ready to spend time with far-away relatives. It’s a month of poetry and bitter-sweet memories.
To celebrate, I was thinking of writing a poem every day for the month. I tend to peter out of these things, but, you know, I’m forty, it’s about time I followed through with something, what else am I going to do, blah, blah. It’s just some words that take almost no time to put out there. And at the end of the month, I’ll have written half-again of all the poems I’ve written in my life.
So looking forward, I’m going to repost a poem I wrote long ago for this October-eve. It was, of course, written for a lost love and has not aged as well as some of the poems I wrote that had nothing to do with women. Such is life. But this was the first poem that had a cadence that I would unconsciously refine into something a bit sharper, a bit less morose, and a bit more universal. From 1997:
###October—and the Sound of It
and I cannot fight this wind
Our bond breaks
I am gone
separated from the branch
and spiraling down beneath the sky
the world rushes up towards me
and twisting and turning through the breeze
I’m sure that this is the end
but then I land
Alone
Soon to be gathered up
and placed within the safety of numbers
This is my fall
My Autumn
This is my October
remember laughing with me
About the silly things
That some considered important
remember holding my hand
Watching the fire burn in my heart
And the dying light within my eyes
this is what Fate meant
For what I let happen
I did not fight that wind
That was my fall
My Autumn
That was my October
What causes the Earth to rumble
is often
the stillness
of nothing…