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Eric's avatar

Autumn Day

Going out, those bold days,

O what a gallery-roar of trees and gale-wash

Of leaves abashed me, what a shudder and shore

Of bladdery shadows dashed on windows ablaze,

What hedge-shingle seething, what vast lime-splashes

Of light clouting the land. Never had I seen

Such a running over of clover, such tissue sheets

Of cloud poled asunder by sun, such plunges

And thunder-load of fun. Trees, grasses, wings - all

On a hone of wind sluiced and sleeked one way,

Smooth and close as the pile of a pony's coat,

But, in a moment, smoke-slewed, glared, squinted back

And up like sticking bones shockingly unkinned.

How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle

By turns, how it fitted and followed the stiff lifts

And easy falls of them, or, like that bird above me,

No longer crushing against cushions of air,

Hung in happy apathy, waiting for wind-rifts:

Who could not dance on, and be dandled by, such a day

Of loud expansion? when every flash and shout

Took the hook of the mind and reeled out the eye's line

Into whips and whirl-spools of light, when every ash-shoot shone

Like a weal and was gone in the gloom of the wind's lash.

Who could not feel it? the uplift and total subtraction

Of breath as, now bellying, now in abeyance,

The gust poured up from the camp's throat below, bringing

Garbled reports of guns and bugle-notes,

But, gullible, then drank them back again.

And I, dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves

Fleeing like scuffled toast, was host to all these things;

In me were the spoon-swoops of wind, in me too

The rooks dying and settling like tea-leaves over the trees;

And, rumbling on rims of rhyme, mine were the haycarts home-creeping

Leaving the rough hedge-cheeks long-strawed and streaked with their weeping.

W.R. Rodgers

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Eric's avatar

deep autumn

my neighbor

how does he live, I wonder.

Basho

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