Fall

 

A tender swelling comes at the still

Heart of things when petals lose

Their too-lighted life and fall,

Failing at their grasping, all

 

Swoon fading.

I watched, too,

The dimming of you, upbraided by

A vein, a flinty core, when blue was expected,

All bright winds, possibly a rising moon,

Possibly a too-near sun.

 

Tell me

Were we bettered by the sky or

Only impatient of patterns? Does

A petal matter at all hours or only

In a brimming darkness where you

Hear no fall, see no lost blush?

 

 

 
Gabrielle McIntire is an Associate professor of English Literature at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Modernism, Memory and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and her poetry and articles have appeared in journals and collections in England, France, Canada, and the United States. She has also written a novel that is currently in search of an agent.