Endings

I’ve always preferred the end of things.
Not the hopeful fuss of starts,
But late afternoons in October
When the light goes thin
And the fields finally admit
What the year amounted to.

By then there’s no pretending.
You can see what grew
And what didn’t.
The furrows keep their own account
Of patient hands and careless ones.
The barns take in what’s left.

Spring is another matter.
Too much promise in it.
Too much talk of what might be.
You’re expected to believe
The future is a kind of gift
Waiting just past the next hedge.

I never quite trusted that.

Better the time when frost arrives
And says plainly what the season was.
Leaves gone.
Branches showing their shape at last.
Nothing hidden now.

Most things end somewhere in the middle.
Not triumph.
Not disaster.
Just a modest clearing
Where the wind moves through the stubble
And the work is done.

If there is a last day
It will come like this:
Late in the year,
The fields emptied out,
No voices calling us forward anymore—
Only the quiet fact
That the waiting stopped.