Something like a promise

November Ends

It may be already late in the year, the son
you’ve not seen for too long packing his bags
a day after spending too little time together,
the high geese incising teeth from the north
raking serrations across the sky above winter
grass already laid in for the siege of cold to
come. These things may all be so, yet little
and so much changes. Sons see the vast
acreage of all their fathers leave unplanted.
Daughters see what the seasons have yielded,
button their coats and go about their way.



This is the epoch of closing windows, sills
scraped clean of hardened candle wax, errant
streaks buffed and wiped from wavy glass.
Mothers soon mingle with chimney smoke to
wander out over rooftops and sleeping woods,
memory and fire warming where the bones feel.
Cinders, for all their sorryless tongues, douse
their lamps as conversations incited only some
brief shivered evenings ago quell to quietus.

This is how November ends. It is not all bleak and
sorrow, however. Something presses from the east,
something like a promise that what has passed will
arrive to pass again, wick by wick, flock by flock,
child by child, November after dying November.

Joseph Gallo
December 1, 2009