LEN ROBERTS
Fall
Even the leaves
couldn't keep him from the drink,
October's first cold fall
of reds and yellows and golds
nothing to him at all
except a safe place to drop,
if it came to that,
as he stumbled back from Boney's Bar,
sometimes making it all the way to our door
before giving it up and swaying
into the pile I'd raked
away from the fence
to where I judged
he might need it most,
like today, looking out at October
again, him twenty-seven years gone,
my son so much like him down there
in the big yard as he leaps
and swims in leaves
I have to shake my head to see
the blond hair instead of black,
the faultless eye, the clear cheek,
but still the stance is the same,
that one-legged kind of dance
he'd totter miles on
when the cold came
and he knew finally his wife had gone
off to Troy with another dark Irishman,
when the bottles leapt like leaves
from the shelves into his palm-open hands
and stuck there with their little hooks
until he'd emptied them and called for more,
and more came, all autumn long,
as the thermometer dropped
