Far into Autumn

Listen carefully, when it’s quiet: this stream,
This little, murmuring mountain creek,
Has a backbeat, an under drum, a bass beat.

It fooled me once: I felt it, heard it, barely,
And assumed it was some punk in a truck,
Unseen somewhere, woofers in his trunk.

Noises can be hard to figure, deep in dense,
Narrow canyon woods, where winding roads
Have tired windy tunes but so do the woods.

Now I sit in quiet and green-a-day, thinking
Of worn phrases for the velocities of change,
But a fall wind is in the branches, tip-toeing,

Moving things just enough so that they say
Dendritic things they never meant to mean,
While boulders thunk together in the stream.