Elizabeth Howkins
Autumn Croquis
Only a few flowers remain
to cast shadows
scrawny as bitten wheat
on the ground
already turned to porcelain.
Drained and pale, their colors
massacred in the lengthening nights,
they stiffen to broomstraws
and hang in shreds while the wind
with its slender frost fingers
clips them like scissors.
The superstructure lies visible now,
the bone case clear as glass
beneath the skin.
The skeletal prongs of trees,
pressed flat like iron rakes
against the sky, reach upwards
like arms, toward something distant
our eyes, still clouded by summer,
cannot see--a world disrobing,
lightening its burden,
dropping its ballast of color,
and the noon like a rag
polishing the skinny limbs.
A sullen world
drawn like a thread
through a needle’s eye of light,
A world of mute mouths slowly opening
and waiting to be filled with snow.
Page(s) 144-145
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