Homewards
The black road gleams out of the rain
Guiding me on through the dusk
Autumn is late and full this year
November
And the trees still wearing summer clothes
They bend and lean and coax me back home
Festooning, generous, sun-bitten;
Perhaps to welcome winter
And the white cracked earth that will reveal itself
Or for the sweetness of the late persimmon
Loading its branch with orange globes
Bursting their skins
Or for the sudden sun
That burnishes that wood beyond the field
Illuminates a skein of geese, to turn them into pearls
Picked out to glint and gleam against the subtle
Grey-blue cloth
That the sky has impulsively decided to fling on.