The Autumn Shore

by M.G. Warenycia

Bleak and blear, the pallid Autumn ray

Pours frail and heatless light

On scenes divorced from the violet night

Whose harvest, fresh-planted, lay

‘Neath the wind-bent pines which brood upon the bight,

Reposing, all still and cold and white;

A cheerless smile, waiting to defile the luckless jogger’s day.

The lake-wind calls up each leaden wave

From out the unglimpsed deeps;

Though shimmers yet the huddled aspen’s leaf,

Already, Winter, into the watcher’s marrow seeps,

And plunges the soul down a darkling cave

From whose sordid shadows flitting day brings no relief.

Pacific Highway

The highway snakes through the ocean of conifer trees

Through the fog-shrouded mountains, high above the sea

Where trucks and saws through the summer hum,

And fitful dreams sometimes echo with ghostly drums…

Sallow, amorphous faces

Drifted in from unknown places

Wait lonely, frost-bitten nights

Playing Russian roulette with each pair of approaching lights.

Dispossessed tenants who are their own rent

Paid through the nose

From meager accounts soon spent.

Trembling, sun-starved hands collecting unwritten bills;

The primeval stands of Douglas fir

Shading the stain of social ills…

Summer’s rude growth of reeds

Swallows, thrown from a passing van,

A black plastic bag of…old beer cans…who knows?

And a debt still owed

Contracted on the side of a Pacific road.

Something in the Woods

The summer sun drawing low and gold,

Damselfly and bee have buzzed back to home;

Aspens rustling louder than footfalls on the mould

That sheets the fallowed orchard’s loam;

Standing on the verge of farms and forests

Limned by boulder and brightly blooming weeds

Whose rhythmic dance the dying breeze arrests,

Stills the squirrels, starts the blackbirds from the reeds.

What bid them silent fall? Not scent nor sight

Reveal, but to my prickling spine it’s clear

That a formless and a nameless fear

Is furtive lurking in the late-noon light.

. . .

A Discovery

What’s that at which you’re peering

Amid the trailside clearing?

What’s that in the leaves,

Where the dappled glimmer cleaves

The forest’s noonday night?

It’s some garbage; it is nothing;

At least that’s what I’m hoping.

I don’t like how the aspens sway

Or how the flitting shadows play

In the grove’s miasmic light.

It’s not ours to save the day;

There’ll be a price to pay;

Drop that stick and quit your poking;

Unhallowed things you’re stoking

And our sleep will bear the blight.

Back away, delete the picture;

Come let’s heed the copper’s stricture,

It’s time we’d best be going;

Look – the coydogs come a’loping

And the birds are taking anxious flight.

The slope they’ve cordoned off

Where the earth runs damp and soft;

The sky is swiftly darkening,

We’d best be homeward harkening

And pray we don’t dream of the sight.

. . .