If the fence gaped at one corner
could I welcome the sky
lying down in grass brittled
autumn blond, welcome that
gray before the rains?
I place you in my drizzle field—
and yet your cyclone,
your picket, your split-rail stands
under the eastern blue,
backdrop to frost’s delicate tracks
along tomato vines, the rambling
squash hunkered to mush.
Yearly we send these letters
to each other and our pasts, the light
tread of our ghosts,
all the dust in place.
On your road to the creek, trees flame
tangerine, persimmon,
red and gold bouquet
an annual dying,
the hardest weather
and the storms we hope will drift in,
disguise the limbs, the ground.
We regret the dark and learn
again to live in the dark.
Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring from Ravenna Press, plus three chapbooks. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and other journals.