Now the darker cloth is drawn from closets,
The summer dresses put away
Whose flowers fade faster than even summer’s own.
Now a minor music begins:
First frost and newfound clarity of sky.

I’ve left you sleeping in the summerhouse
To walk the loved edge of the lake
Where the southward flight of geese is more heard than seen,
As this summer may come to seem
A season less remembered than invented.

Already there have been too many words,
Too many versions of the way
The light fell across the water some certain dusk
And the “stunned” trees on the far shore
Caught fire: candescence, conflagration, blaze.

Now the darker cloth is drawn from closets,
And we who loved the world must learn
The language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms,
The irrevocable distance
Between the goodbye and the letting go.