All True, From the Life

Fall’s first cruelty, a savage storm,
Has ravaged my trees of their gold.
All told, something like thirty oaks
And a dozen elms stand bare.
Broken branches lie everywhere, their red flames
Doused in the cold, wet grass.

But I’m wrong to attribute wrong,
All goes just the way it should and far beyond
The moody judgments of a melancholy man;
No, everything is stamped with life’s benign imprimatur —
Even now, as I look out through my screen door
And feel what might have been

Construed before as a damp rebuff,
I know it is only the wind,
Redolent of wood smoke, ozone, and leaves;
A gust that carries every valence of my years. 
So why a sudden twinge in my nose
And my eyes overflowing with tears? 
Joy, completely unexpected joy —

I have to laugh at how we hardly know ourselves,
The facility of the soul that’s like the heart:
Faithful, constant, quietly working for us.
It must be my soul that says look up,
See the moon through a mottle of trees?

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About the author
Patrick Walsh has called Princeton home since 1993 with a brief hiatus in 1996-97 while he earned a Master’s degree in Anglo-Irish literature at Ireland’s University of Dublin, Trinity College. Along with Kelsey Review (in 2016), his poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Chronogram, Cimarron Review, Evergreen Review, and War, Literature & the Arts, as well as in venues abroad, including The Malahat Review, Poetry New Zealand, and THE SHOp. He has three more poems forthcoming in the ongoing Spring/Summer issue of Evergreen Review.