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.

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.