Stir tender in tundra

Surrenderance

Morning now as summer expends
its last strafing, presses autumn
to the ground and slays the trees.

Somewhere a half-world away,
winter unflexes its stranglehold;
dormant chutes stir tender in tundra.

You were like this once in my arms,
enveloped in a purse of seduction,
your hunger uncoiled and spilling

from a fog-veiled tower as you
fell rapunzeling out. So does
a season succor the sunwrecked.

What was once green becomes straw
as what once swelled becomes stripped
in the cyclic surrenderance of water.

How else might a lush Sahara
be born in the middle oceans
of a vast, expanseless human heart?

Joseph Gallo
September 26, 2010