My October Poem

A segue from my poem "Elderberry Tale", this is one of my Petrarchan sonnets, written in slant rhyme. 

It was first published in The Lyric (Volume 97, Number 4, Fall 2017) and is the title poem and final poem of my book, Pointing Home (Kelsay Books, 2019).

 

A typical Pennsylvania landscape in autumn.

 

 

 

 

 

Pointing Home

 

All things on earth point home in old October:

 sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences,

hunters to field and hollow and the long voice

of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

           

—Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River 

 

 

In expectation of approaching winter,

a woodchuck slips into his grass-lined burrow;

the fall migration of the vesper sparrow

begins, as afternoons grow shorter, fainter.

The blood moon of the Abenaki hunter

wanes, as mercury glissades toward zero:

apprentice to the North, I’ll need to borrow

the mettle of a born and bred Vermonter.

 

And so, when mountain winds conspire to wither

asters, mums and marigolds; as mice

prepare their cellar nests; before snow flurries

sweep against the windowpanes, I gather

pitch-pine kindling for the fireplace,

and from the riverbank, late elderberries.