Forgive me, Mother, it’s October again,
Time for the earth to climb back
Into sleep, time for the great outpouring
Of pumpkins and ghouls and chapped windfallen
Apples heaped in baskets in the stores,
Time for people to amuse themselves
With their public fears, with their private
Sorrows, with their phantoms quickened
By an appetite for sweets and pranks
And showing off the living to the dead.
I don’t know why, but I wake up
Sometimes in the middle of the night,
And in an instant this season pours over me,
An instant so certain, so familiar
It seems another life is with me there,
Bathed in the first soft light of day:
A door ajar, a stairway standing full
Of shadow, and you are saying goodbye
Again, not like a thousand angels
Parting on the road—for what are angels
To a child just rolled from his blanket
Of sleep—but like a woman beyond
Her anger now, and holding a suitcase
Heavy already with the loss she’d carry
For thirty years . . . . But we can always
Walk away from such moments, and since
We can, we do, we say to ourselves
“Enough of that” and enough of that!
We sit up in bed, turn on the lamp,
Awaken the one beside us, and then
Very quietly we begin to tell those
Stories we really only half-believe, how
When we were young the world was young,
And when we were green the world
Was green with us. But then what
Would be the point of that tonight?
Standing at the window after work
This evening, I watched out
Under the aspen trees, a group of five
Black neighborhood kids with garbage bags
Pulled over their heads, and down
The street my skeleton son returning home
Harrowing a terrorist who was crying
Because his bag had split—and it was good
To be in a place like that, where
The dead make jokes and the violent
Weep for a moment or two. So forget
What I said about myself before,
And forgive, instead, the woman who
Holds herself in her arms, the man
Who holds himself in his, this season
That’s come to knock on your door
Disguised as a gondola, some
Absence still weighing on its oars.
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