Poem

Autumn

The ‘where to’
is your last stop. A night’s
drive and home before sunrise.
All the road unknowns
soon will ease away into sleep,
your mind tracing white and yellow
lines through all of your thoughts.
What guides you easier
than the North Star, compass,
parents, friends? Engine
tuned, gas tank full, wheels straight;
it is the geometry of travel.
“All worry,” you say out loud, “is removed
out here on the road.” With no moon
or streetlights, your vision is limited
even with high beam headlamps: you
can only see 40 to 50 feet ahead of you
in an ellipse
that hides all angles
of vulnerability. You open
a window to stop the slip,
the nod, the drowse. The cool air
fills your nostrils and lungs,
tears your eyes and parts
your hair. You smell autumn,
fall: an old sweater
you wear once a year, kept in a cedar chest,
the fading perfume of a her sex
from a full night lying
in an apple orchard. Cores
of your appetite brown
in the dark, scattered with dried leaves
and the backs of your heads damp
and pillowed on roots and clumps
of meadow. The air is musky and prickly
with yarn, sweet
and tart as warm cider and cinnamon
and cold as a brook’s stone plucked
from coursing black water. It is the air
of cyclical death on your face,
everything seems to fall
into place within the commingling
of white and yellow lines,
have reason.