October Morning
by Sean Sexton
comes to elaborate skies of lavender blue,
uncooked summer melon peeking through.
The Elephant Ears have risen all season to hold
the chime by its tongue, and so the view impeded
from beneath; so many ways this happens in world-
ly devise—vine and bush, branch and leaf always
at the edge pressing in. This is the time little
voices sound the landscape: calves, flute-like in
every quarter with maternal riposte in bassoon or
didgeridoo. A dog faintly barks—then other faunal
insult—a forgotten air-compressor on the stoop
suddenly wakens, begins filling its tank with how-
ever much leaked overnight—
more mechanical wildlife—
truck after truck beating its way to the mine on the distant
thoroughfare, all taking place within a scurrilous wind.
Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch. He divides his time between managing a 700-acre cattle operation, painting, and writing. He is author of two chapbooks, and three full volumes of poetry: Blood Writing, Poems, Anhinga Press, 2009, and May Darkness Restore, Poems, Press 53, 2019, and Portals, Poems, Press 53, 2023. He performs regularly at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, and is on the faculty of the 2024 Southeastern Writers Assn. Conference on St. Simon's Island, GA in June . He was nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize and received a FL Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. He's a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation and founding event chair of their Annual Poetry and Barbeque held each April, now in its fifteenth year. He also co-founded Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, FL featuring nine concerts annually attracting poets from all over the US. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.
