Poems October 1988
Harvestmen
October, you see them propped on porches,
straw, the size and shape
of somebody’s cast off
flannel shirt and hole-in-the knees jeans.
One arm cradles a pitchfork. Sometimes
it’s a couple, side by side in wicker rockers,
she stuffed into a long faded dress,
a flowered hat, a live cat dozing
in her lap, or a whole family
in effigy, their pumpkin heads smiling
at the leaves going down in glory,
our old selves, after the reaping,
what we make of them,
who, otherwise, might have been
as straws in the wind.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 7 Number 2, on page 42
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