This has been quite a season for loss. Natalie Cole, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Pat Conroy, George Martin, Merle Haggard, Patty Duke, Grizzly Adams, one of the Mondavis, one of the Eagles and more—all dead so far in 2016. And since death is often, if not always, on poets’ minds, I offer a poem from my first book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, on just that subject.

Seasonal Losses
 
Passing last summer’s weathered hay,
the tires splash on blacktop as fall rain shingles off
an umbrella, weeps from the cupola,
makes a cool counterpoint to the zealous
 
blooming in my friend’s head, the malady
that sets a milk carton on a lit stove,
shuffles into the garden, naked as a rosebush. 
It won’t be long now.
 
The dead this fall—their absolute numbers--
heavier than I thought, than brush
piled against the fence, their particular faces
reduced to one skeletal face, as all that was
 
supple, extra is pared away until their passing
requires only someone to sit and watch
the scant twist of flesh from which inclination departs.
 
Driving into the fast-growing tumor of the city,
winter rye sprouting in the sidewalk cracks, a quick
explosion of chill shucked knees and elbows,
 
I leave behind remaindered dirt--
beyond recognition, all that’s left of fall--
the damaged stone,  the austere moons of their nails.
 

I wake later now, the big dog insistent at the covers. I write less. Longhand aches. I remember Naomi explaining how, like her teacher, she stole the early morning from her hectic day, wrote into it the wonder of a windowsill in first light. When my back windows looked out on a fence and a landscaped bit of green I woke with her injunction and wrote the sun up.
 
This morning’s oak and pine, dogwood and sycamore are gray and black and branchy against the hillside just showing splashes of daffodils and green dogwood blossoms while here and there a few brown leaves still cling like memories and downed timber is visible in the unleafed woods lying like corpses in last year's duff. In such natural disorder, I sleep late until what sun there is has cleared the eastern gully and I’ve killed some working hours with sleep. But I'll do better. I await an early sunrise and an early me-rise and time to think line by line.