A Gift of December Leaves turned russet and yellow lakeside, the hills prove late blooming a possibility, rescinding for a while the promise of songs about the austere stages of romance, and worse, black sticks and branches overhanging this my own world. I know whose woods these are. And I have only today to get something right, which means finding me in this momentariness. So what’s new in that? Forgive the old fashioned verse and the Frost plug. (He’s hard to get around.) Who knows but that tomorrow crucial witnessing is withdrawn and the heart of the mind of the soul with it. How to live wholly for a while is what one gets. Happily a poem once begun writes itself, as if there were such things as the laws of songs. Well there are. (Blame Bach.) They’re there but you don’t know till after the first line. And the last furnishes closure, as in fiction. (Those in this trade know what I mean.) Now, what about today, this hour, this morning that has night for accompaniment. I watch all morning the leaves furnishing my day’s yellow light and it narrows, invents the eye, the same eye that survives the dark and the ruins that must soon become the hills. My only hope is my selves endure in what I am unable to complete.