Mid-November

Another autumnal poem.

            Mid-November

Indian summer has come late this year.

Though the trees are largely bare,

we rake their leaves in our shirt sleeves

and sense the ghost of August in the air.

The migrant crows look large as mammals

and land with a thud on the autumn roof.

From the bedroom, their hard scrabble thumping

eerily echoes the prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

Our muscles are aching from all that raking

and reaching in an unaccustomed arc,

but despite the strangeness, the story is still the same:

after the light leaves, all that’s left is the dark.