Poetry by John Surowiecki
The mountain laurel is as green as the
maples are orange. Deer visit as if on cue,
hoovering the seeds we left for doves
and newly arrived juncoes.
Anything to do with spring and summer, with lilacs
and irises and that wistful pneumonic yellow,
is long gone, escaped in the raw humidity of
night. The wigs of dead leaves
are already caught up in scattered whirlwinds.
It’s clear we don’t have much time together.
Rainwater that leaks from the driveway gravel
has pooled in unlikely places,
not the swales that engineering has intended.
The silence between a breath and the breath that
follows it seems to last forever. October
is no longer with us: you’ve taken its place.
It needs a new face, yours, a new voice, yours.
It needs your swallows and mourning gnats
your own phrase on the fiddle which everyone can hear:
you, the season of leaving, have your music too.
John Surowiecki is the author of fourteen books of poetry. His latest, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was recently published by Wolfson Press. John is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize and other awards.
