THE LONE CICADA


Someone had to be the last.


It's the cirrus sky of mid-October;
season's blood has spilled to ends of leaves,
and from leaves' red or orange dangle, yellow drift,
you heard that end of August, plaintive rasp.


It's like six weeks of fruit
have vanished into this slow rising wind,
and then you're breathless with the suddenness
with which ten minutes pass,
or ten million years as well,
the shadows of these yellow leaves
blurring with pale, soft sunlight
that angles now toward frost.



Lee Slonimsky

About the poet: Lee Slonimsky's poems have appeared in Best of Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Measure, The New York Times, North Dakota Quarterly, Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Poetry Daily, 32 Poems, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, and have received six Pushcart Prize nominations. My second collection of poems about the life of Pythagoras, Logician of the Winds has just been published by Orchises Press. He is the co-author, along with his wife, Hammett Prize winning mystery writer Carol Goodman, of the Lee Carroll Black Swan Rising Trilogy (Tor Books).