Jacob in November

The wounded autumn in Toronto streets
brown leaves at night
and light in the broken ice of puddles
soil and smoke and snow --
on the stripped branches of a tree
a hundred apples like luminous moons.

A gold and emerald scarf, transparent,
rises in the wind against the dark
dragonfly over the waters of flood.

My crippled enemy
strike me with this death, your heart
that where we stood the frost will find
the cold air only

and rising and descending, we
may go with our new name, like innocence
through an immaculate element of water.

from Because the Gunman
poems by Maggie Helwig, 1987