Monday Poems: "October Larches" -- by Robert Pack

Across the mountainside in evening sun
Golden October larches flare,
As if they could delay dark days to come,
Winter encroaching everywhere


My momentary mind can reach.
And in the lake, silent as brooding inwardness,
The larches now are doubled, each
With a true partner in itself,


A multiplying plenitude of one,
Repeated and repeating in my mind.
Reflecting on its own reflections, stunned,
With bold illumination of a kind


Beyond what golden sunlit larches teach
Of how to face the all-dividing dark, I find
A multiplying plentitude of one
Across the mountainside in evening sun.


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Robert Pack lives in Condon, Montana, and is a Distinguished Senior Professor in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana - Missoula. 


He has written 22 books of poetry and criticism, including his most recent poetry collection, Laughter Before Sleep (2011). His poem "October Larches" appears in his 2004 collection Elk in Winter.