A Warm November
Golden night in the early gloaming
Warm wind with an edge of cooling
So late to be so warm

Every year the days shorten
but every year stretches a little longer
So later, comes the cold

Prophesy is a game of fools
Looking to clouded eyes for sight
So the clear-eyed blind

Slave in thundering quarries
Filled by the loud, the sure, the writers
Uncertain rock, for cobblestones

Cut the current growth?
The wise corderoy with standing timber
Who stops to read the rings?

Common disasters taken for
Bloody-minded Apocalypse in his full and final stride
The end crawls, unnoticed, three-limbed

The only thing we know,
Wanting, waiting, willing, unwilling, wise or fool
Future, what it will, will come

No guides of knowledge
No deliberate renunciation or mystical bond
The present only knows the past.

So we wait, seeing
Only the present turnings, coolings and warmings
And speculate, dreaming

The coming fire, the paradoxical freezing
The rising - the dying -the living -the certain changing
All to come, or coming not, evaporate with the night.

The light of future days unseen yet
Yet gleams reflected in the last light of gloaming
As night comes early in its warmth

The silent rumble, a great wheel turning
New tracks torn by mighty masses moving
The immovable moving

The future's in the air, can you smell it?
The scent of dusk, the harvest musk, the coming snow
November in the warming.

11/5/01