for Diana, after her seventieth birthday

by Brandon North

Throughout the tilting course of October

aging forms will themselves to beauty,

no longer content to be precious when gone.

Within the shortening slots of daylight

allotted to autumn’s peculiar displays,

elder requiems arise with the fading heat:

legions of leaves forgo their green fatigues;

stoic gourds spill their sticky innards;

bees and gnats do mathematics near trash;

and mycelia emit fungal artifacts.

The muting splashes of augured color all about

shift where I sit to a grove without sound

to help me forget, to have a child’s mind

as I think of you splitting like dry leaves in wind.

You’d slumped in your scarlet chair, pallid, until found

and still you sit, as if being painted for the first time.

The blunt eloquence of dying provokes us,

though repeals of fact will harvest nothing final.

For each birthday we see, we know less and less

about death, our guaranteed miracle.

Brandon North is a working-class, disabled, and multi-genre writer from Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook From The Pages of Every Book (Ghost City Press), and his poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Annulet, The Cleveland Review of Books, Bridge (Chicago), and elsewhere. Find him @brandonenorth and theappreciator.substack.com.