October
My wife sits reading in a garden chair
Pope’s Moral Essays by the failing light,
As Leaves turn epileptic in the air
And through the woods some poachers, and the night.
Pope’s natural habitat: a bullet rips
The homespun silence and the volume slips,
But catching it she finds her place in time
And never drops the stitches of a rhyme.
Braving the season in the name of wit,
She holds each couplet in such close esteem
No maniac can put a hole in it.
The year’s in tatters, but she makes a seam;
The house is civil, though the wood’s insane,
And man’s the missing link who lets the chain-
Of-being shake. It’s hanging by a hair.
My wife is reading in a garden chair.
by Barry Spacks
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986