Sunset Song

A fiery sky – no, the sky fires,
verbs itself into cinder –
and autumn, that old conjuror, retreats in slow motion,
a magician backing out of his own trick,
leaves still applauding long after the hands are gone.

Waning wings –
or were they warnings? –
their ghost-sound lingers, a phoneme without a mouth,
feathered parentheses closing the sentence of the year.
Gone.
Gone says the air, practicing grief.
Gone say the trees, mispronouncing themselves into bones.

The birds depart in silence so loud it bruises the ear,
flight without music, music without cause –
an aria sung by absence,
a choreography performed by what refuses to stay.
Farewell, then, to this –
this cracked and hollow shell I keep mistaking for a home,
this ego-egg, this skull-sun,
this moi that rhymes too neatly with void.

I say farewell and the word fractures,
fare-well becoming a wound you pay to pass through.
A shattered kaleidoscope –
no, a kaleyed-o-scope, eyes boiling into color –
its fragments misplaced, mislaid, misled
into the democracy of dust.
Once, pattern promised coherence;
now symmetry breaks rank, defects to chaos,
joins the quiet riot of particles rehearsing oblivion.

Time sheds its bright illusions like obsolete skin,
chronos molting into chronique,
a gossip column of moments no longer true.
How lavish the lie was, how convincing –
golden hours posing as eternity,
afternoons flirting with forever.
Irony smiles here, thin-lipped,
knowing how quickly the sublime becomes merely late.

Light fades, but gently –
as if even extinction has learned manners.
It falls soft upon the fields,
upon roofs dreaming of collapse,
upon this lonely world practicing emptiness
the way monks practice silence.
Everything seems contemplative,
even the stones thinking about not thinking.

I walk through the afterimage of color,
through reds that remember being suns,
through yellows fluent in farewell.
Language stumbles – deliciously wrong –
nouns behaving like regrets,
verbs leaning too hard on their pasts.
This is solecism as sacrament,
grammar breaking so meaning might breathe.

What remains?
A residue of wonder, stubborn as rust.
A pun the universe makes at its own expense:
fin pretending to mean both ending and refinement.
A double entendre where death keeps winking at birth,
where dusk and dawn anagram each other in the dark.

So let it go –
this season, this self, this splendid miscalculation.
Let it go says the wind,
tongue-tied yet eloquent,
saying everything by saying nothing at all.
The world empties itself beautifully,
and in the hollow –
ah, in the hollow –
something listens.