Autumn By Charles Wright

November the 1st. Gold leaves

Whisper their sentences through the blue chains of the wind.

I open a saint-john’s-bread.

Green apples, a stained quilt,

The black clock of the heavens reset in the future tense.

Salvation’s a simple thing.

From “The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place,”

edited by Christopher Buckley and Gray Young

(Heyday Books: 446 pp.,

$16.95 paper)