Ah, how I love the autumn time, that vast glass tunnel — clear, sublime — that every year the universe inserts between the summer’s glow and winter’s skirts. Perhaps it strikes you as surprise, you who so love the summer skies, to see me fall for autumn’s hue, this season old, yet born anew. Perhaps it jars with what they say, the travelers who all proclaim one way: that summer is the only reign worth crossing lands or seas or plain. But I — I love the fall. I rest my head against her shawl, her wrinkled breast adorned and crowned with garden gates, with rust unbound, with withered leaves, with warmth grown frail, the breath of dusk, the last exhale. My ear pressed tight to roots and thorn, I hear her heart of apple born, its pulsing sound through soil and loam — the quiet beating heart of home. When love came softly to my door, it was no longer summer’s shore; too many things had bowed and died, collapsed beneath the stormy tide. The ploughed fields lost their braided hair, their tangled grasses, pale and bare, along the winding country ways — the township roads, the olden bays, the nameless paths where none now tread, for fear that frost might rise instead, to seize the stones, the city’s face, the boulevards where dreams erase, the moon’s dark side of tar and chain, where asphalt weeps its black refrain. When Earth tilts sharp, in sullen pose, against the sun’s declining glows, that weary orb, from gardens drained, asks leave to weep, through clouds unchained — to spill its heart, to let it rain, to rest at last from light and pain, and lay its warmth, at peace, alone, upon the moss — soft, damp, and grown.
