Reading at Stockholm University, October 16th 2013

Old Autumn Poem

As the seasons are changing in Stockholm, I recently remembered this poem I wrote in Santa Cruz in 2004. I was nineteen. I remember the assignment: write a poem in two parts, each containing a contrasting color. So here is that nine year old assignment,

A New October

1. 

We step out onto our stoop

as the ginger dusks slips into night

and I think I can smell, pumpkins

coming in with the cold

We drive a dusty car

through shadowed streets

staring into the yellow gold glow

of strangers’ attic bedrooms

and lamp lit living rooms

the scent of toasted seeds

and heated caramel crawls

out the orange space beneath

a kitchen door

2.

In the crisp of my first “grown up” autumn

living alone, sharing a bed, I stand on sand

and realize that to dive beneath this surface

of cool blue glass, must be what is like

to be a man, the quiet of life without air

My ocean changes with the seasons

especially here, I watch it rise in the cold

and deflate in the warm summers

yet, always it stays the same wash of blue

Happy to have two poems in Two Thirds North 2013

You can read the full anthology here, http://www.twothirdsnorth.com/two-thirds-north-2013/

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