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THREE PIECES ON THE SMOKE OF AUTUMN

Smoke of autumn is on it all.

The streamers loosen and travel.

The red west is stopped with a gray haze.

They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,

They make a long-tailed rider

In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.

Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.


There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.


Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.


(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)


I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.