Sext

Mirabile dictu, I got some work done today. One of the "little hours," high noon, sext. There's a wonderful website that's about the flora and fauna of the Charles River area. I found it yesterday, and spent a long time looking through its lovely photos.



SEXT, FRIDAY, THE RIVERWALK

October noon. The sun can barely clear
the phone pole’s cross before it nods and sinks.
The town’s crewcut the pathside down to lawn
up to the tangled shrubs, and vine-choked trees
that line the riverbank, good husbandry,
but I miss August’s crazy underbrush.

All gone, the horseweed, thistle, tansy, vetch,
burdock and primrose. A few spared grasses bend,
still knuckled with their seeds. Close-up, back-lit,
they seem phalanges, porous, much like mine,
age-bleached and fragile. Asters -- purple, white --
froth at the foot of headless phragmites,
pure lateness, last to flower, last to fade.

And, suddenly, I buckle like a stalk
too frail to stand before such radiance.
I’m stripped of seedhead, godhead, dry, alone,
pure incarnation, compost, on my knees
beside the bike path, asking nothing more
from high noon’s little hour than darkness. Please.