How foolish was I last June
still clinging to a love of Spring.
All those maniacal mating months
acting like some May Queen Mary
apple-blossom cheeked
crowned with Chervil and Hawthorn
in a frock frothed white.
How clean and cold and clinical!
Those chromas all outshone by lurid tints
by gamboge, philamot, carnelian,
the gold of an October, bright with sunlight
as the young, the hot blooded,
take wing for Africa. Their leaving
makes the month quite mellow.
And still there is no blue
as blue as a November sky, the trees
gleeful with frost, crisping the last leaves
and the air. Then I too breathe deep
and sigh with satisfaction.
How foolish all that looking back,
the past just frozen snapshots, impressions
memorized as imprints on the eye.
All my soul's desirings are here,
now, in this season of feuille morte*
May It never End
And after May...but I wish for a never after
holding fast as Faust to that month's moments
when quiet lanes foam at the mouth with birdsong
froth-full of petal and wild chervil
Such an eruption of aqua vitae!
Pouring though every pore of earth
and in one rush of landscaping, readily spreads
like the ingénue's awkward blush
It is green loitering on the brink of solstice
neither tenderfoot nor a mature and motherly shade
- but really there are no words this side of purple
lest we tangle in hyperbole around the Maypole
Call me melancholic if you will.
For when the budding month is set to swell
bursting in a boisterous cannonade of confetti days
I flag the voyaging vessel with signals of distress
June comes now, spring-heeled and hot on the scent
of an all-too-soon, consummated summer.
Yet spin we must, in synchrony with time and motion
or forfeit the chance of heaven
- gamboge – leaves with a vivid yellow pigment as from a resin from an Asian tree
- philamot – derivative of feuille morte -a yellowish-orange-brown colour of dry leaves
- carnelian – leaves having a reddish-orange or brownish-red, like the colours often found in the quartz by that name
- feuille morte – literally dead leaf as per colour – see pronunciation.
For my MTB prompt: Backtracking Your Truth in which we write A Palinode which contradicts a previous poem’s ideas as this ode to Autumn which rescinds my June 2023 poem “May It never End“.
Note: Today is ‘Tell a Lie” day so none of it may be true!
PoetryPix 