An Accumulation Of Autumns

lately I feel she said an accumulation of autumns
as if all that red and gold had been stored up
for me, a kind of harvest

of the years, of the strange glistening of
the turning of the years and I feel a glaze
come over my soul

like a katydid and porcelain green
pale green
and as if I stood at the same screen door

when the evening wind came through, fifteen,
and heard the bells from down the street
drifting on what I called to myself, back then,

the convent's wind.
but that was then and now it's high midsummer
that autumn comes to mind, an accumulation

of autumns and I am a child so deep in the
crunch of the dream of the piled up leaves
never dreaming that all this gold all this

pumpkin lanterned hold on me and the
sunset miasmas clinging to the after sleeves
the ache of childhood's backyard trees

I no longer see-

will disappear

mary angela douglas 29 july 2015