Brief Autumnal Haiku

summer itches on,
die slowly, dear, or linger
autumn saunters in

barn owls hooting
pines bristling like hedgehogs -
leaves gold transform

the sun-browned grasses
crimson moon o'er city lights
red the fall anon



Haiku is not my specialty, turns out. But they are fun to try anyway.

Sandburg Autumn - Crying over beautiful things

I'm working, already, on a story for nano. Though I'm uncertain about that actual plot line (generic, poor at the moment), it is character driven, which is something I've not done for a longer story yet - though perhaps the thriller was just a really lousy execution of something intended to be character driven. And perhaps I'm a bit bummed about the plot currently because I've only just started working on character, and it seems I'm stuck as to where the story will take these people. But I'm still working on a pattern to spice things up.




I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. 

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
   sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds. 

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, 
   new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, 
   and the old things go, not one lasts. 
- Carl Sandburg

I think it is near enough that we can pretend fall has arrived. The weather is confused about the switch, but nighttime recovers from daytime's misled summer heat. I'll miss the sun, I'll cry over its absence, but I know the fall will be wonderful as well, in its own way.

Heliotrope

If I allow myself, the kaleidoscope of life might easily carry a negative image, a half-empty glass symbology. When I am thankful, I might feel guilty over those suffering, and when I cry out for help, I could feel shame at not considering all God’s providence. 

heliotrope

charioteer of gold

a solar snail solipsizing

over a cold and needy world:

shell out some warmth

along your sticky way -

rah the phoenix fire,

flimsy green necks turn

purple faces at your arcing egg -

boil us over easy

Heliotrope is my new favorite, though that may change in the next ten seconds. The sun turner, like a tiny sun-saint anchored and devoted: deep green your spades, digging through beams of light and sweetening the air.  But it’s the purple petals, the golden anther to the sun like an offering, an obsequious mirror, though you are none so shy or coy. 

Thoughtful Thursdays

Blossoms of bliss breeze into burgeoning mists, billowing the day away. The horizon's a sunset lei, all carnation floret and orchid violet, a concealed twilit sky - cosset me in, oh, blanket of grey. Jasmine and trillium score my dreams in musical white and gaudy greens. In the morning, only wisp tails remain, ghosts aghast at blooming dawns, and fleeing, fleeting as ballooning spiders on gossamer trails.

Thursdays, Thor's days, though  scarcely as galvanic or striking as lightning, occasionally not unlike lying between a god's hammer and anvil. Today's music was broken, dissonant, merely a noise of decibels ground out in hours and ticking time.  A pandora's box of living, a burning punishment for a theft of fire.

The mornings are chilly, though the sun still slants through the sky. Fall is more agreeable when enamored with the symbols than the inclement weather, and expecting chills that eventually transform blankets into the womb of dreams, a warmth I'd rather never leave. Waking in the mornings, greeted by a night still charged with darkness, where is diligence and motivation? My scrawlings in my journal tortured and illegible, like crow claws dragged through ink. Why is a raven like a writing desk? Nevermore.

Tomorrow is my little brother's birthday. Happy birthday, little fellow. I'm ever praying that you turn out greater than I, faithful and true, honest and kind, a gentleman and a scholar, a believer in great and good dreams. May your tomorrow and all your tomorrow's tomorrows possess an irrevocable destination without falter. When you misstep, learn still greater things from these than even your triumphs, for this is the human experience. Test boundaries, for many exist only in imagination, and beyond those fences, illumination resides. Be ever wise.

Here are a couple of quotes for thorough Thoreau Thursdays.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

I just wanted to write something worthwhile, and sleep isn't forthcoming. My muse is shivering and huddled near my heart, and my fingers are still typing. Sometimes, I just can't write anything I like. Tonight is such a night. I drank ginger beer (no alcohol... just ginger. who do you think I am?), ate stir fry, read, and sat before my computer, tabula rasa. I'm not thinking - am I,still? Oh, you silly sophist brain, sleep. Maybe tomorrow you can write.

Season of Senses

Sometimes the senses are strongest in the swinging seasons. When the earth slingshots around and a quickening growth or decline of sunlit hours describes the dreidel wobble of the earth. When the greens grow or crinkle, when rains drizzle down the branches into nutrient-rich earth, as chimneys spew smoke and pines music the air, as dogwoods die in crimson, sugar maples in orange-red, broad-leaf maples into yellow-orange, and japanese maples brush purple, while the larch trees transform into goldenrod yellow, painting the mountainsides in hearth-fire. The noxious fumes of city factories ripen in these seasons, bleeding into the stones beneath our feet.
Already, the morning condensation settles along the windows with an illusory icy sheen. Even as fall slowly settles, a wintry breeze promises cold, and not long waiting.

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhyme and without rhythm, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the prickings of consciousness?
~Charles Baudelaire

Willingly blinded, I minded not my senses, not my memories: the scented trees, autumn breeze, patterned paintings of passing time.  Beards of fire burden the trees, the pond cries reflected tree tears and broods on blue; a giant fowl sits over the sky, incubating, and its nest of branches and fog is a ghastly ghost nest, fledglings shivering beside fires. Glance away, and I remember not Fall's chai tie and patchy pumpkin sweaters, his shaggy hair and shredded trousers. A slate gatsby hat settles atop his head, and he limps, his disposition darker every day. I recall not, for my perception rests, and wakes only blind, now and again.

Fingertips...

You need them.

I was grating ginger for a curry soup with a micro-grater, and removed the tip of my index finger. It swiftly formed a pool of blood (deep enough not to drip right away - actually bad), before I stuck it in my mouth. Fun facts for self-doctoring: saliva contains mostly water (over 98%). The part of saliva that is not water contains some interesting things, including white blood cells and enzymes useful in the clotting of blood. So if you cut yourself, spitting on it or sticking a cut finger in the mouth can aid in the rapid covering of platelets and a sheathe. In addition, saliva is an anti-bacterial, and helps prevent against infection. Pretty fancy. So I spent a while sucking on my finger. I'm slightly anemic, because I don't get as much iron in my diet as I need, but my blood tends to clot better than it should, considering its thin aspect.
It's difficult typing, I assure you. Some strange things I noted: the rest of my fingertips, despite sustaining no injury, all prickle in pain incessantly, as if enduring a sympathy throbbing for the inflicted finger; being bi-dexterous helps a little, though I still require my right hand for certain activities. The blessing is that my left hand catches on quickly to delicate tasks. Also, I use my right hand a lot more than I anticipated, and my passwords for the computer are muscle memory, and since one of my fingers is out of the equation, I have been having trouble remembering my passwords (since I can't use that finger). Bah.

Rivulets down the roadside streaming
Tides the autumn breeze's bringing
Light in cozy abodes flick'ring
Eyes unfocused distant dreaming
Hopes they waver, faiths unfold
A lone, untouched, unbridled cold

When choosing to fight lonely battles, you can only blame yourself for defeat.

Stumbling into Fall

Early-morning frost sits heavily on the grass, and turns barbed wire into a string of stars. On a distant hill, a small square of yellow appears to be a lighted stage. At last the truth dawns on us: Fall is staggering in, right on schedule, with its baggage of chilly nights, macabre holidays, heart-stoppingly beautiful leaves.
~ Diane Ackerman - A Natural History of the Senses

Autumn batters that distant gong
This new season's song
A glorified rhyme and time
The dawn rises in pink butterfly wings
Slippering the hills - the morning sings
Notice now this summer requiem
Questions I ask the clouds
Whose cotton shrouds heaven's lantern
It's now the poets and authors and muse
Pen their lines and lyrics and truths
While gutters sputter and water spouts
Queries I pose at the shapely clouds
A rhino, an angel, a spoon
Do they know?
Where the winter sits in august's time?
How lightning lights and cracks and blinds?
When feather snow from heaven's pen
Stops us in our homes, curling
Like kittens on the mantle, purring
In that radiant glow,
reflected in our eyes and brow
Ember leaves drop - somehow
Coloring and cleaving close to earth
Cleft as the dreams and hopes
Of the loved and loving days of halcyon
Will you - Autumn dear - come near at night?
Under the falling stars of this white-robed sphere
We'll garden walk, our toes alight
On diamond-dewed grounds like fields of starlight
Whilst whistle we write and dance and smile
Through mountains, forests, the tigris, the nile
It's Autumn, telling transparent tall tales
Where copper, crimson, and umber prevails
In the honeyed, pumpkin, cider trails of time.


Cleft is an interesting word, in each of its conjugations. It is a rare word that means nearly its opposite. I cleave to my ideas, I am cleft from hope. It assumes either a separation or a uniting of pieces, a breaking and a binding. But between each element, whether in the cementing or the clipping, a thin slice remains. When a man cleaves to his wife, there is still an individuality, a preventative from an ultimate merging. The progression into the next season is such, a cleaving more than a clear-cut, a sliver between times.
Already the maple leaves assume a yellow-green, light and lovely as daylilies, and dogwoods hint at their crimson future.
So many things fall, this time of year: the leaves, the hours of sunlight, the temperatures, the clouds over the valleys, the rain (oh, the lovely rain!). It is the season of writing, when temperatures outside forbid long mountainous hikes and I begin penning, sketching, defining the flavor of the clouds floating above like mashed potatoes in a menagerie of grey, mythical shapes.

Augury of Autumn

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. 
~- Lord of the Rings

A curtain of mist descends upon the valley, and the earth radiates redolence in reply. Not far now, not far. Summer's scorching strangle-hold over the sky is overthrown, and silver linings settle in, augury of autumn.  The woods thrive on this; you can hear the whispers, and as the sun sets, somewhere behind that glaucous veil, does the sun settle down to rest? The wind howls beneath the grey wolf sky. There is no moon.
No fanfare sunset with wispy clouds like exploding pastel balloons, no dramatic denouement into dusk - this solstice strikes the world as a shooting star, flickering and brief. I saw one, last night, and wished, for what use superstitions if we cannot smile and dream?



September Sonnet

On this then, Autumn's eve
Aspen greens still leaves deceive
Mulling ciders and chimneys smoking
'neath blankets thick our hearts are warming
From summer's callous, hungry scorching
Borders clearer now, distance greater
Mountain's clouded brow, fog and rainy river
Ocean's wide and growing whisper
Faithless one, can you not believe her?
Or leave her your bleeding heart
Sacrifice - is that not your art?
Like summer sun doth love depart
And parts the seasons into mists
Fall's birthday, dear, blue eyes I've missed


Some things I've never known, cannot know. Patience I work on - need it tarry so long? Trials and tribulations bring joy, right? It is a praying night, a thoughtful night. One of those days where you wake up excited, ready for joyful adventures and friends, and discover they're all significantly busy - is it still the season of love, loveliness, and wildflowers? Silent Saturday, then, and one I've probably procrastinated too long. And church a la mañana. Be peace enough.

----------------------------------------
The shape sliding through the underbrush was unseen, though it concealed its passing not. An acrid aroma hovers ominously on the air, the smell of sacrifice or industrial waste? What town was this that assaulted the senses so? Dim lights burned in the valley, silent as stars, and atop the ridge, vertical slits watched, unblinking.

Sunday Night Dreams: August Lands

Rumors drifted as a cool breeze across the burning hearts of the sore dwellers. They stood there, as every eventide, entranced in the prehistoric cannibalism of night, consuming the fire of the heavens. When the sun was swallowed, the thousand-eyed monster would open its eyes, and with countless teeth gnashing from the sea, it stared hungrily down, and the tribe would soon scamper into the hiding places, the caves of the coast, until the angry burning was reborn.

Their backs were stooped, scraggly hairs and hirsute faces merging into chest and arms, like patchy animals with ragged nails and teeth. Dull their eyes, but something, deep in those wells, shone a knowing, a spell of survival that surpassed simple savagery. And this knowing despised something of the searing heats, and their childlike thoughts savored myths of the temperate lands like sweetness on the lips. I remember. There are few of us who remain, when the prophet came, telling of the land behind these tooth-tipped waves and beyond this dome of the sky. He appeared from the wind, and his words invented magic and music these creatures understood not. Still, to this day, the distant children of this people cry, knowing not why, missing pieces of their soul. Listen: his songs fill those holes.

"A distant land beyond these waves, with peaceful nights and cautious days, whose maples sway and leaves gold turn, turn, an endless fall. You've sought it long, and know not for what you're made. These lands call your names. Golden trees with silver leaves, a pleasant breeze and fearless eves, and a love worth taxing days."

Some were bought, some stayed, though the sea was fierce and broad. I, for one, must see this fall land, this endless summer burnt me bronze and black, eyes dark as night and no joy, no joy left for this living fire. So I ran across the waters, we were stronger then, faster, and we chased the sun at night. So fast, so fleet, it never escaped into the monster's maw, we pursued it endlessly. At least, the shores of silver greeted our endless sunset race, and golden trees and singing birds whistled as we landed, the deer grazed unafraid. Even the sky cried in joy, and we cried in fright at its falling tears, hiding under those honeyed boughs.

We stood taller, eyes shone brighter, and we paid the price for fall, and gained a strange knowledge in return.



Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes when you fall, you fly.
~ Neil Gaiman