"... where nothing as dangerous as Autumn ever seems to happen."

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Mark recommends these on line literary sites.

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Contact
Mr. Weiss

Husbandry

Attention sways, can't fix
to anything.

Every morning he goes to his garden
barefoot, for the cold pleasure. Each day the beans
are a little taller; the wind
has flattened them against the wire
just long enough for a tendril
to take hold
so that the vine may climb
towards sunlight. All of this
as if by accident--as if untended: this row of lettuce,
this of beets,
a vagrant clump of weeds, a pile of cuttings. After all,
it's the ratty ends of things
he finds attractive. Little room
to cultivate a life
or a wife.

To accept one's lot may be
to become a pillar of sorrow,
he thinks, but to be alone
is salt itself.





Harvest

In my last New England Autumn I played the odds
the night first frost was called for and left
the rest of the tomatoes
unharvested. They somehow
survived, bright summery red
against the firs and grass
in the waning light of my garden clearing,
the swamp-maples in the streambed
the maples beside it
and the vivid undergrowth in the pine-duff
flaming their various golds and purples.
When I finally plucked them
at the last moment before hard frost they made a sauce
to last the winter. Now
in this season of death, my first such,
my father dead, and Bill, and Richard,
I make the yearly sauce across the continent, where nothing
as dangerous as Autumn
ever seems to happen. I think to make
an emblem of that last
harvest before winter,
as if my father and Richard
had not strangled on their own fluids
and lovely, curious and fastidious Bill,
whose presence itself could heal the wounds of childhood,
had not turned hideous in the act of dying.