Autumn ends
with the jagged rain of early December,
when its redundancy
hasdriven my mother
to haul patio furniture to the cold storage
beneath ourdeck.
When the air tightens around her face
and the entrails of herbreath
become visible.
When the lobes of oak boughs
lookpetrified,
icy rain-beads cling to their branches,
shivering and contortingbefore the long,
shapely separations.

She has never liked thisreplacement of seasons:
the cold, hostile and subliminal.
Her sorrow isthe cyclic
and progressive exchange of weather.

She remembers as achild
knowing only her island
of the Pelham Parkway projects,
herfamily of six
and a pervasive compulsion to argue.
Her mother latertraced
this recurrent tension to Gershwin's Concerto in F
weaving itself inthe background;
her father was a tombstone,
unmoving.

My motherknows every year
the frost will imprison her life,
force her to lodge theglass pane
into the nook of the screen door.
By this time half-snow
has coated the cedar bush out front,
unshaven over its needledwaterfall.

The soundless collapse of light.
And then the early,cancerous shadows.