In his dissolving mansion, autumn’s author
is an exhausted autocrat, dying faster
than the falling house is falling. Rainfall, raw
and raucous, claws the roof as he dodders down
broad halls, rattling knobs inalterably locked.
Once all gloss, paunch, and wanton frivolity,
he’s now all thought, not somersault or song,
and he wonders what those lost enthrallments meant.
He knows they weren’t false, though behind the last,
unlocked knob, a chalk-faced pallbearer coughs.