A Reminiscence

By Richard O. Moore b. 1920

Held in a late season

At a shifting of worlds,

In the golden balance of autumn,

Out of love and reason

We made our peace;

Stood still in October

In the failing light and sought,

Each in the other, ease

And release from silence,

From the slow damnation

Of speech that is weak

And falls from silence.

In the October sun

By the green river we spoke,

Late in October, the leaves

Of the water maples had fallen.

But whatever we said

In the bright leaves was lost,

Quick as the leaf-fall,

Brittle and blood red.

For Kenneth Rexroth, 1950

Source: Writing the Silences (University of California Press, 2010)

Biography

Richard Moore, a documentary filmmaker for public television, was one of the founders of KPFA—the first publicly supported radio station in the United States. He was born in Alliance, Ohio, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied poetry with Josephine Miles. He was associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and frequented Kenneth Rexroth’s Friday meetings for poets, philosophers, and poetry . . .

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