The Darkling Day...

Yellow leaves dive past my windowsill
Like drunken finches pitching to their rest
They pile in pungent layers on the hill
Where musty patchwork quilts a sodden nest
Two seasons worth the chill-wind starves and fasts
Its vigor now turns vulgar, desperate; harsh
It tugs in bullish rage fall’s flimsy mast
And decks with gold, the street, the field, the marsh
As cattails shiver in its iron wrath
The milk-weed spills to sea a silver path

Stark silence threads stripped limbs, exposed and bare
Betrayed by tresses, scattered and wind-blown
If glory to the woman is her hair
Then beauty to the tree must be its gown
The lowered sky offers no modest shroud
But rather it enhances her distress
A backdrop dark; of tumbled glow’ring cloud
Appropriates the ruddy wind’s caress
It sets against the cold horizon-line
Her petrified, yet delicate design

The pasture boasts a shrug of startled green
A folly of ephemeral disguise
Brief is the comfort of deception’s sheen
Too soon beneath an argent sheet it lies
Yellow leaves tumble to earth's ready tomb
Swift, phantom fingers pluck ragged remains
None shall escape the purple-knuckled plume
Of grumbling gale  and raw November rains
As they succumb to winter’s calliope
Waiting for Spring in womb's of quiet hope

© Janet Martin