RIFFING DECIDUOUS
Summer, old bore, though we love the ways
you reduce everything to five shades
of green, one of these days
in a fall of soft tonnage, your stranglehold
on the obvious must end. We need those
deciduous farewells that reveal
from cranberry bog to hogsback,
from seagrass to sky at dusk, not red
but its modulations: solferino, murrey,
minium, not yellow but vitelline and those
others nameless as the obscurer insects.
On one of those clarified mornings,
in a nest like a straw handbag
hung to the weather, in a fright wig out on a limb,
in cones of grass and false beards
precariously woven, the instinctive faith
of birds will reveal itself to a walker's eye.
As if to prove all things must have their time,
the textures of fox sparrows will be
no longer subtle, but flashy and necessary,
until we can trust that if we pay attention
we'll hear the groaning into being
of things believed in though unseen - a gasp
as chives gain the air, and even before equinox
the sound of a rubbed balloon
as wings chafe cold from the winter-brittle blue.
Brendan Galvin
Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005
Louisiana State University Press
