Death in Autumn by a Waterfall
In autumn’s gold-larched, cold Cascades
a river runs down a mountain—
whose slopes are hued in honeyed shades,
glazed in spray as from a fountain—
to kiss the stone of an abyss.
From water dashed against granite
a roar rises like plains thunder,
while the bay, from trees that dam it,
smells of moist earth from dense vapor,
and mist bedews sheer cliffs of shist.
And there in brumey, drizzly clag
waits the gloomy, black-robed reaper,
calm ’neath a cantilevered crag,
to bear an old careworn sleeper,
with soothing hiss, to the last bliss.
