Alternate title: Never Such November
A Spenserian Sonnet

Re: November; the approach of winter; twilight years.
Retirement, or early retirement or involuntary retirement:

Yea, I have looked, and seen November there;
The changeless seal of change it seemed to be,
Fair death of things that, living once, were fair;
Bright sign of loneliness too great for me,
Strange image of the dread eternity,
In whose void patience how can these have part,
These outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart?
- William Morris, November

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation:
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer,
I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855, I Celebrate Myself, Line 238

The sun slides through blue sky blinding its light
rose-staining the horizon’s stark season;
changing my mind now that I have the right;
the aim’s the same, the route’s but whim’s reason.
Once it was daytime, free time, would tease one
trapped in survival routines, lifestyle schemes –
treadmill time – severed for the life I seize on,
seeking textures in these demi-dark extremes.
Days, bright and gray, weave this chapter’s new themes;
fly faster but I feel them, ride their speed.
Each weighs in its way fulfillment’s regimes:
I drive me, turn my coupe to heed my need;
to live my dreams, the fall I’ve slaved to see;
to hunt and game for the poet in me.

© Helga Ross 2003, 2006