KS Culbreth

In These Weeks Darkening

in these weeks darkening
early and when the leaves
all round the station
are reddening and each
snaps and falls and tumbling
alone

lands passively in the soft
fluff of the song of evening
churchbells, on a moist ground,
in these weeks when the
rich soil, a dark and loamy silt,
fragrant

of all the autumns we’ve known,
chill mornings, city sunrise, the harvest
moon, the withered bough creaking
with the wind’s cradle-rocking
lull, alone in a loft the
haunting

of Octobers-past begins, of souls
unknown, gone now, the moment
the one chance, flown as the leaves
are blown, slantwise, groundward
where the wind gathers them. in
innocence,

in huddled piles they cling where they
become a whole again, the bells heard
through all the evening dimmed,
a million rooms, each with a sole
occupant, each bundling for a
heat

gone out of their lives
unto the alleys and roadsides
abandoned homes with unplayed
pianos, as miles away supper
is served, the meal a memory
of a heat

and later the sleep a cradled bliss
of recollections, or a gathering
of leaves in the separate
darkness of regret and loss
the sleep lost unto a dream
of an innocence

wherein the faceless strangers
of these foreign towns
hustle toward November
and toward the stronger
wind, the barren woods
the haunting

of this town’s evening with its bells,
the early dark and cooling air.
this moment bound to a haunting toll,
condemned to a dream, to the loss
that mocks us when a love’s
forgotten fragrance

mingles with our breath and it again
is the evening when all our dead
join us in our chilly loft, the distant
bells, the scuttling leaves, we touch
our fingertips, smiling, warm and
not alone.