It's hot in this red room, inside the beating heart of the ritual,

explosive.

now with duress, bleeding its stress onto the oriental carpet.

The salt, little corrosive.

grains of light, works its way into the meat.

We talk. We watch. We eat,

our two miracles ingesting the atmosphere between us.

On the table, on a golden plate, the apples bloom.

The long-beleaguered home team, black hats and orange piping, is eliminated on a cool night,

the very end of September, with the phlox zerspalten by rain, as Benn wrote, and giving forth a strange animal smell, seltsamen Wildgeruchs.
While the neighboring team from across the Bay, the ones with green leggings, younger and more brazen, were finished earlier still, after the clamor attending their midsummer surge.
Frucht-und Fieberschwellungen abfallend . . .

Even the strongest of young arms tires over a long season.Tumescences of fruit and fever. . .

Knees give out, just as the parapets of Troy rear into sight.
What do the sky and gardens know of such disappointments?

Of the quiet on the street, life ebbing from barrooms like a yeasty tide?Go home, everyone go home.

The cupped flame, the extended sigh of smoke in the shadows of a hundred doorways.

Go home to your wives, go home.
Why must it always end this way, every year the same?It is only we who change,

Time eroding our powers—des Sommers Narr, Nachplapperer, summer's fool, jabberer—

putting to rout our boyish hopes.
And even with the air so sharp once night has settled in—vor dir der Schnee, Hochschweigen—when the season's first hearth fires mingle their exhalationswith night-blooming vegetation, snow and silence ahead of you,
the sun next day pours down with such intent as if it could surpass what only it might emulate, its counterfeit betrayed by the very merest wash of bronze
enveloping the Chinese lantern, jasmine and flowering lavender in a memorial glow while, still, they bloom, thrive, reach up, upwards, toward the light and out from amidst the withered stalks and ruin of what summer has left behind.