OCTOBER

 I like to think there’s something vaster than myself,

Hidden in the past, to be rekindled by a word…

-- John Koethe, “Belmont Park”

Sitting on my parents’ green sofa and

staring out the big picture window, as I’d

done so many afternoons, the room

empty of music and books, except the west

wind blowing through the screens, curtains floating

like a ghost, and here it is October,

the apples have ripened and the corn picked,

the wind gusting, unnatural so late 

in the year, 85 degrees and the trees

bending in the deep blue of memory,

sitting as I’d sat for days when my mind

slept after so many pills, the drowsy

wordlessness, empty as the vacant lot

across the road, hearing ghosts whisper

in the periphery, soulless waiting

for consciousness to return, but here,

the wind washing the world and sweating,

thinking of nothing but the fullness

of feeling, feeling now as if there’s nothing

but feeling, and waiting, staring

out the window, at the oak branches

dipping, the same brunt grass, and the vacant

lot, the anxiousness of space full of nothing

but the wind, and now, caught between that

emptiness and fullness, alone and thinking,

this is how he wanted to pass, his breath

labored by the shrinking lung and asbestos

knots, to simply scatter like ashes

in the wind, sleepy, drowsing consciousness

drifting, swept free of memory, only wondering,

wondering, all of my life waiting

for this moment, for this passing, this wordless

yearning, all the hours playing baritone,

filling the brass with something that swelled

with feeling, the elegy and all the wondering,

wandering, all the yearning to feel

something known as love, and loss, and the hope

and the hot wind off the harvest fields, what

the west carries, empty and fulsome, it’s

all passing again, like it always has,

for the very first time.