AUTUMN

     —after Appolinaire

My grandfather carries a military issue satchel, thumbs a ride

from the shoulder receding to gravel and ditch, receding

to a cropless pasture which holds last year’s broken tractor.

And over the carnival of passing semi traffic he shouts

and curses the luck of gods and men,

his voice whirring out the mechanics of failure.

To him, this season could be any, for they conspire.

Over the crest of the next hill taillights keep disappearing.

Travis Mossotti has most recently been an English Lecturer at the University of California Santa Cruz. His first full-length book of poetry, About the Dead, has been named the winner of the 2011 May Swenson Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Utah State University Press. Mossotti's poetry has appeared in Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Hunger Mountain, New York Quarterly, and many other journals. In 2009 he won the James Hearst Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize.