Autumn

by Rob Lowe

There is a slowness in English autumns,
A pause, an appearance, before the Fall;
Balanced withholding from sudden changes,
To slip without drama into the cold

 
Alchemical sleep of the ending year;
I smell the ways they stir on the verges –
Stubble, acorns, brambles blotched with ageing;
Webs of spiders, their coded announcements

Then the revolution: fields bare as bones;
Shock and awe of a blasting December
Consuming supply lines from November.
But that is a violence yet to become

Today is the last of summer memories,
To harking back to dry weeks in July;
Recalling fruit trees heavy with harvest,

Hung under a sky that scarcely darkened

 
August, September, times of preserving,
Their stillness invaded sinew and bone;
And everything seemed so secure then
Before the war came – wind, downpour and storm
 
Till then I exist in an in-between;
The sun inspects its columns of branches;
Footsteps of light leave imprints of shadows,
Where small lives scuttle to sheltered places
 
The rivers no longer complain “I thirst”,
But nor do they burst their banks with surfeit;
This is the moment all is forgiven,
Waiting, remembering - ordered to move?

 
That will not happen, not for a moment:
This season awaits the brown leaves applause;
Only then will it raise up the curtain –
A stage without light, a plot without cause.