In Exeter, the apples lay rotting on the garden path,
As gentle Devon summered in a late last bluest sky,
And man-tall hedgerows that lined
The brown-mapped roads up on the moor
Began to show their russets and their goldens
As the light began to die
Earlier and earlier, the thorny hawthorns bare,
The maple, oak and dogwood leaves floating down
To hedges’ grassy banks,
Leaving holly and primroses to brave the coming wind,
To color through the gray.
The chill was there that long past fall,
A marker of an unseen pulse, a throb of
Strife, not hers, she thought, but from the
Rovers on the quai, the travelers’ dogs all running wild,
Or hearty shouts of revelers closing down
The pub at 2 AM in Wonford Road.
She didn’t want to know.
She closed her eyes, and didn’t see the world was spinning
Way too fast; her garden bloomed through early frost,
She carried on; the blind eye turned to
Balm enough no matter present tense:
On the trellis by the terraced beds, the bramble and the ivy twined,
She should have seen the signs.
Ah, well; all that was long ago, the choirs stilled, the
Gateways closed, the spring of making new again
Choked by betrayal’s rust; corrosive lies,
And long into the future that came awake in that bad
Dream, the beauty of that year turned to dust and formlessness.
In dormancy all things repair; they sleep into another time,
And so she did; the decades cloaked in silence as she moved
Through past and memory, stoked indifference, turned
Away, resolved to find some relic, some retrieval from the ash.
Who knows just where forgiveness lives; who tells one how to do it?
But forgive she did, with wisdom earned, eyes seeing all around,
And now she sees another turn, another of life’s seasons:
Her spring was dashed, and summer too; all that is gone
Forever now, a waste of her, a waste of time, time ungifted witlessly,
And no recoup, no recompense, though
Steeliness and wholeness won,
And she is seeing where she’s been; the hedgerow bare,
The thorns to keep the wild ones out,
But the holly’s red, the primrose blooming,
For she is autumn now.
