Equinox 2008

The world is balanced on its toes tonight,
Waiting for the even sun to fall,

Although nothing hints at last year’s
Luxuriant recall.

September sweeps into a pile of leaves,
Brushwood blowing down the road,

Nonetheless. Neon sprays of summer
Are dying on the ground, the celestial node

This time completely drained
By a foreign, otherworldly light,

Disconnected from the comfort
Zone of fall—the amber dusk, or bright

Embracing college yards, where the future
Seems so clear, spread out like grass,

Precessing optimistically to snow—
Anyhow, the reasons for the moment mass,

Autumns wheeling into wind, but always
Circling like the skimmers down the skies

To spring, each defective blaze
Of repeated morning new, every rise

A gift, as if the gears of heaven drift
For us, each short, slight slough of sound

An echo of our broken star,
No matter how the ocean drowned

Or ice swept beating earth away.
Dreams that froze the solar floods,

That silenced clocks and deafened trees
With their static screams, were flesh and blood

To the racing endless sea, the perfect
Mirror to the planet’s pantomime:

Not slides of astronomical effects,
Not doctored calendars of time,

But insufficient labyrinths we size
To even out the season’s winding lies.