I was in Barcelona with my children and missed my favorite hour of the year--Daylight Savings Time!

                        Fall Back


This late October phantom hour
          its extra minutes
                              stolen from a long lost Spring,
In this invented time I lie awake
         and listen to the clocks tick
                  the spirits of dead seconds.

                              And feel rise up
those fragile ghosts of petals
         that long months ago fell like kisses
                    into new grass,
Feel them rise this hour
                    on breezes appleskin tart
         from their mossy graves.
In this strange and fictive watch
                  they resurrect like moths
         drawn upward to the harvest moon.

And rising too,
         dead summer's languid breaths
                  her lazy sheen,
                              her fevered dreaming,
         her blue nights sticky with gardenia
                  and a lover's moon with stars come close
                               to smell the heat still in the grass.

Feel all these rise up from night time earth--
         loamy and made pungent with the dead--
All these spent, and gone to mulch
                 in this enchanted, stolen hour
                                Arise.