20th Anniversary

October 10th marks the precise twentieth anniversary of P.F.S. Post taking to the airwaves. Over twenty precise years, I'd like to offer thanks to everyone who has participated in the site and helped to make it a memorable one. To mark the twentieth anniversary, The Metallic Autumn, by Andrew Duncan, which first appeared on P.F.S. Post a month into its existence, seems appropriate. Thanks again. 

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms as a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers split.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
late berries languish on the tendrils,
lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
where dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy hearts for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
and their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscle, dissolution of concepts;
season of case-hardening ash,
season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and stream their brims
overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
on the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall stake out the torpid mist,
pure-axile crystals shall affirm the morass.

© Andrew Duncan 2001