Waning

Some days you wake in July,
but by evening it's gone to September.

Yesterday it was August all day,
the thistledown drifted the roads.

Just the same, it was hard to trust life.
All that I love is alive and already ceasing.

Hoarding old bones—the splinters of saints—
would be saner. In the fields

they were reaping, the sounds drawing closer.
then circling away down the meadow.

How can we love
when love must watch life cease to live?

How can we not
when downy seeds blow the ripe roads?