Has come time’s length through his old windy house
For this—
For what, then?
Neither.
I am a woman in a waterproof
Walking beside the river in an autumn rain.
Above the trolley bridge the market gardens
Are charnel fields where the unburied corn
Rots and the rattling pumpkin vines lift brittle fingers
Warning—of what?—and livid, broken skulls
Of cabbages gape putrid in a pond—
My face under the cold rain is cold
As winter leaves that cover up the year.
35
