Michael Hogan
Autumn
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold.
—W.B. Yeats
New England teaches us all we need to know about dying:
the russets and gold of oak leaves, the helicopter seeds,
the sap in the veins of maples rising,
the smell of decay and fallen apples,
the murmuring of bees as they gather
over rotten fruit before returning heavily laden to their hives.
Nowhere is death more spectacular and richly in tune.
Unlike my car, an old generation Dodge, which today
when the thermometer fell, was dodgy.
Traffic was stalled on the bridge and I fretted that the old beater
would suddenly freeze and I would be trapped amid blaring horns
and angry commuters.
meanwhile my top left molar throbbed with a dull ache.
The news was full of fake people
reporting on the deeds and misdeeds of other fake people
who wanted everyone to know how important they were
fighting like cats in a bag which (unbeknownst to them)
had already been tossed into the sea.
The sea itself was calm, the Bay to my left even calmer.
A few early gulls were screeching toward some resolution
I could only imagine until finally the traffic broke and we moved on
and the sun came from behind a cloud and I could see the futile
towers of the city reaching for some assurance of hope
not desperate surely because they were inanimate
but seeming so as if their architect believed that
in concrete and steel he could somehow escape oblivion.
Downtown the pigeons had finished their commute
from park to office towers and back again.
So, now they were waiting patiently for any comestibles that might
appear on pathways when secretaries took their coffee breaks
with bagels and croissants and dropped their crumbs
where enterprising birds might find them.
Michael Hogan is the author In the Time of the Jacarandas (Egret Books, 2015) and 23 other books. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, and others. His work is included in Perrine’s Sound and Sense and the Pushcart Prize Book of Poetry. Hogan lives in Guadalajara Mexico with the fabric artist Lucinda Mayo and their Dutch Shepard Molly Malone.
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