My Heart at Evening Towards evening you hear the cry of the bats. Two black horses bound in the pasture, The red maple rustles, The walker along the road sees ahead the small tavern. Nuts and young wine taste delicious, Delicious : to stagger drunk into the darkening woods. Village bells, painful to hear, echo through the black fir branches, Dew forms on the face.

Both Autumn and Truth Wear a Coat the Colour of Wine As if the very quintessence of the earth After warring with the green powers of the sun Were flooding upward again, Capturing, dyeing and branding.

The maples are weakest, and the sumacs also surrender, Magnificent losers, redder than Adam’s flesh. Only the firs are aloof, secretive, rememberers In winter, of the green energies of the sun.

As if the grapes were crushed in the field, tincturing

As if the rotting apples corrupted the tree their mother.

As I rode along that road I distinctly saw Twenty shades of brown, Diminishing to greyness, flaring to wine or blood.

the vines and the ground.

HYAM PLUTZIK

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