Fall Calendar

 

The leaves crawl down the street like spiders;
the sun burns low in the sky, going out
like a spark from a campfire. I wax and wane
like one of my nephew’s cigarettes.

Now Jeremy’s been murdered in a fire set
by a strange, enraged woman, no one he knew.
He fell dead from the fumes,
his body burned beyond naming.

I walk in a circle till the light is gone.
My doctor thinks I’m not punctual.
I grieve it’s not still September, October
gone and taken a bite out of the days.

News from south Texas after November floods:
there are so many tiny blue and yellow butterflies
that if you stand in any one place too long,
you suffocate.
 

 

 

 

The Darkness of the Fawn

 

whose white spots hide it in treelight,
is always uncertain in the clear afternoon
of fast buckling day, the long night
we calculate even though the coyote
brings his own illumination home
to a den in the daylight as though
to see or be seen would be to upturn
the diurnal cycle because there
is no rest for the pitiless.

 

 

Robin Scofield, the author of Flow (Street of Trees Projects) and Sunflower Cantos (Mouthfeel Press), has poems appearing in The Cimarron Review, descant, and Lummox. Poetry editor for BorderSenses, she writes with the Tumblewords Project in El Paso, where she lives with her husband and her Belgian Shepherd dog.