Now dark has chased the pinks and golds away.
The clock strikes eight;
the spell of sunset fades.
(Nothing gold, not even sunlight,
stays.)
The howling night creeps in
with rasping breath,
with breezes bitter as the stunted apples on the trees
whose flowers snowed the sidewalks months ago.
These winds tonight portend
a ruder chill,
the kind that piles yards not with leaves, but snow,
which sticks like grits to ribs
and
does
not
go away
till March,
a month
so far from now,
it seems forever and a day.
The easy summer––
oh, so sweet––
has melted like an ice cream drip
too fast to lick,
just
whoosh––
then it was gone.
It left
this late September haze,
an inverse dawn.