More Is Needed Than the Leaves at Night

after Wallace Stevens

More is needed than the leaves at night.

A little ruby light, and the wind, and the cry.

And where the winter far off

Makes autumn auguries of the elms that line the streets,

Then change itself is arbiter, and conductor,

and draftsman of that melody.

A man, his pink baby beside him,

Watches the green burn into dark evening brown,

And dwindle and drift in weeping swaths

Lower and lower to the ground. And his life

Pierces through every season, and finds

This and the next a new year and a

New year, all somewhere total tending.

The baby begins to cry.

The day is streaked itself

With furious little lights.

The man takes up his child

And, watching the falling dark,

Somewhere in his heart finds himself appalled,

With his child, there crying, in his arms.

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