Poem | The Poetry Foundation

Fall a scrimage of yellow leaves today

All over Lincoln Park

Like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next

world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field

Museum by the lake.

I am carrying the night.

I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars

for the dinner of the Dalai Lama.

It is the sky two nights ago;

Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word

for blue had been invented;

The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric

creatures moving in a dance;

The stars are brilliant ants. They may have died

a billion years ago.

I feel so happy. It is as if I'm with my wife who's making

sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street.

I like everything about her.

The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene

and love everything about it for its reality—

These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish,

The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins

intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry,

Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish,

The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown

Is almost ghostly,

The way the family album on the table in the livingroom has

a gallery of ghosts.

There is only wonder.

Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur

We're allowed to touch

As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum.

I bike along the lake and watch

The whiplash of the waves and think,

I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been

a star:

Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree. Or been one of the

bees of oblivion

In any ordinary orgasm.

If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.

Source: Poems (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1988)