Kurt Luchs
Fall
Days grow short, like old people bending toward the earth.
Shadows, the advance guard of the night, take more territory.
Leaves let go and surrender to the great dying, the great sleep.
Wind sucks the marrow from the bones of the branches.
Painted turtles grow somnolent, sluggish, sink to the bottom of the pond,
enfold themselves in mud and begin to breathe through their skins.
The sky suddenly notices her age and applies a deeper shade of mascara,
one that complements the clouds nicely,
but like most of us she's just whistling past the graveyard.
The world, which is always trying to kill us in an offhand way,
decides to get serious about it and sends
a cold snap that bites like a dentist's drill and forms
fingers of frost that clutch at the bottoms of windows. Darkness, death
and eternity will have their say, though perhaps not the last word.
Bio
Kurt Luchs has poems published or forthcoming in Into the Void, Right Hand Pointing, and The Sun Magazine. He placed second for the 2019 Fischer Poetry Prize, and won the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as writing comedy for television and radio. His books include a humor collection, It's Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's Really Funny) (2017 Sagging Meniscus Press), and a poetry chapbook, One of These Things Is Not Like the Other (2019 Finishing Line Press). More of his work, both poetry and humor, is at kurtluchs.com.