Ode to Autumn
       

You are overbrimming the hive's clammy cells.

Why set budding more, and still more, later flowers?

Why trick the bees to guessing good days never cease?

You and I both know it's getting cold.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Mist is wet,

but mellow means your dick no longer gets hard.

Fruitfulness means you have children. A load is what is

hoisted and released. Bless is drench, to vine is to tie,

to bend, to fill, to ripen up your core. To swell and pump

plumpness into sweet. I translate the line:

Who bath not seen thee oft amid thy store? as

Pothead. But in a good way, as between friends.

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

thee... on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

anyone looking can find you passed out from opium,

and the scene is striking because you were scything off

a bloodred harvest, and the patch ahead is bright red,

and stops at your recumbent splayed somnolent body.

After a while, life is a basket full of what you
made and you have to cross a brook, so you
carry it on your head. You feel every muscle in your neck.

The juice is thick, the sun's bright hand
pushes through a cloud with long fingers of light
that prod at the tawny stubble after harvest
and make it pink and glow.

Gnats whine in the willow trees by the river, a ball of them
floating up and down on single breezes.
Lambs bleat, crickets chirp, birds sing.

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Copyright © 2014 Jennifer Michael Hecht All rights reserved
from Who Said
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission