Through the Trees, the Tower

the high branches

of late autumn’s trees

on this night’s dark horizon

seem so many diagrammed sentences

with the words all falling off

and I look down to see

nouns and verbs strewn, blowing

at my feet, and I look up and there

through the naked syntactical structures

are the brightly lit top stories of a building

on the nearby university campus

making me wonder whether the literate sentinels

of the ivory tower are aware

that the words are tumbling

dry from their sockets

to crumble underfoot!