![]() This isn’t regret, but relief that again this year we will give up the Chateaux with a minimum of bloodshed. And I’ve got leaves in my pocket for company and I’m walking through the sunflowers and chicory of the autumnal Midwest, and I’m singing for my occasional friends- two Labradors-who come bounding up and I’m singing for the kid paid to walk them but who’s always late, singing because I don’t like dogs much, but these two include me as if I were still inclusionable. The tree has wriggled one green leaf free and waves it goodbye like a hankie, waves I’m all right, I’ll be home, don’t worry. So I’m singing for the ash and the cottonwood, then for the cowardly willow, for crows dying in their steeples, for shirts I should have never thrown out- the ones with destinations on their chests I'm singing swansongs and torch songs, songs of the Chinese Coffin-pullers, of men standing on one leg, of the birch outside my window abducted by bag worms. It was still the same black feather on the tongue, they were still the same superior forces. And I love the way the ash is the first tree always to turn, throw its hands in the air and say shoot me like a tourist on the subway or the way Napoleon’s troops burned the flag rather than surrender it, then drank the ashes in brandy. ![]() I’m walking through goldenrod in new shoes, shoes I got for a song- like the one I’m singing now that pleases the cicadas, the one that would make Schubert cry.
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