Poem by W.R. Rodgers about autumn

I ran across this poem completely by accident, in the morning on the first day of fall, in an old, stained anthology called The New British Poets. I can't even tell what year the book was compiled, by critic Kenneth Rexroth. But it's a great collection, and I turned to Rodgers first because I like him, and there was "Autumn." This poem is so full of playful sound. I especially like "such a running-over of clover." Also "dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves." ("Scurf" means flakes.) I'm struggling with "substractions." Don't miss "How my heart...was silk and thistle/By turns..."

Of course, fall in the west isn't really like this. But I remember falls past. All of my falls past.


Autumn
                              Going out, those bold days,
O what a gallery-roar of trees and gale-wash
Of leaves abashed me, what a shudder and shore
Of bladdery shadows dashed on windows ablaze,
What a hedge-shingle seething, what vast lime-splashes
Of light clouting the land. Never had I seen
Such a running-over of clover, such tissue sheets
Of cloud poled asunder by sun, such plunges
And thunder-load of fun. Trees, grasses, wings -- all
On a hone of wind sluiced and sleeked one way,
Smooth and close as the pile of a pony's coat,
But, in a moment, smoke-slewed, glared, squinted back
And up like sticking bones schockingly unkinned.
How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle
By turns, how it fitted and followed the stiff lifts
And easy falls of them, or, like that bird above me,
No longer crushing against cushions of air,
Hung in happy apathy, waiting for wind-rifts.
Who could not dance on, and be dandled by such a day
Of loud expansion? when every flash and shout
Took the hook of the mind and reeled out the eye's line
Into whip and whirl-spools of light, when ever ash-shoot shone
Like a weal and was gone in the gloom of the wind's lash.
Who could not feel it? the uplift and total substraction
Of breath as, now bellying, now in abeyance,
The gust poured up from the camp's throat below, bringing
Garbled reports of guns and bugle-notes,
But, gullible, then drank them back again.
And I, dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves
Fleeing like scuffled toast, was host to all these things;
In me were the spoon-swoops of wind, in me too
The rooks dying and settling like tea-leaves over the trees;
And, rumbling on rims of rhyme, mine were the haycarts home-creeping
Leaving the rough hedge-cheeks long-strawed and streaked with their weeping.
                                                                              - W.R. Rodgers