Evenings in October

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It’s the Schubert piece that does it . . .  
tonight you are moved into the dark to come  
where white roots are suddenly remembered,  
growing beautifully out of soil walls of a cellar  
gone half a century . . . white roots  

like vague regrets, that perhaps in the end  
hold you here . . . not exactly discontent. 
Yet with the Serenade come undertones  

of all the times you should have stayed still,  
should have listened, or waited, or looked,  

not kept acting and moving as though  
you always had somewhere else to be. 

Longing—one thing grown stronger  
as you grow older—lingers without object . . . 
like what’s glacial but hardly perceived 
at the far edge of night vision. 

Beside framed faces of children in dusky light,  
something of Schubert and Brahams 
remains in the room—the piano near windows 
unplayed until they visit, recital recordings,  
tapes and CDs fi led in drawers as protection  
against loss of impromptu, ordinary joys.  

Lamps off, you watch a pale rising  
in the ink-blueing sky, see again how we used to gather    

on large boulders still warm in the cooling dark 
as the lake went violet-silver those summer nights.

The drifting moon seems thin and translucent— 
old parchment about to tear; words, too,  
casualties of the throat aching and closing 
with no animate cause.  

You breathe a long breath, try to attend 
the exquisite themes of Schubert, instantly recalling 
how some beauty widens so close to pain  

one might try to avoid it, 

how once as a child in the moonlit dark  
you chose a route more closed and sinister 
through wind-stirred pines, passing by the open luster 
of fields  
to walk the long way home.