Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

THE STATE VERSUS AUTUMN
RESOLVED: For the sake of decency
and the order of the land,
the Congress hereby abolishes
the unwanted month of October...
No more Octobers ever?
Has the Society to Outlaw Gloom at last
succeeded in the Senate halls?
Has the Lobby Against Dead Leaves
banished arborial pollution?
Resolved: That the falling of leaves
disrupts the conduct of business,
distracts our children from their studies,
depresses the widowed and elderly...
We hereby outlaw deciduous trees.
How long, then, till the squad cars come
with their phalanx of armored cops,
handcuffing my corner sycamore,
chainsawing the neighbor’s rowan tree,
tearing the vagrant maple from the street,
screaming with bullhorns for the ailanthus
to disperse from hillsides and parking lots,
interrogating runaway saplings all night,
wresting confessions from an effeminate birch?
The casualties will mount beyond reckoning,
the loss of leaves beyond count,
numbers too large for a superchip
or the chambered cranium of a C.P.A.
It’s a conspiracy, of course:
the Moral Majority, the Vatican,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons,
an arm-in-arm league of Fundamentalists,
their hidden object a simple one: