October’s precision. Everything under the sun is sharp, preening with the ethic of freshly waxed cars, buffed and shined. It is as nails made brilliant, as hard bright vernis. Brushed wire. It is shadow or it is not. It is bursting pods. It is golden rust, rods, pods. A leaf falls into a pile of stiff percussion. Rustling. Crouching leaf, crouching skeleton. Wine veined, ochre colored. Same conversation with variation. The earth is calling in echoes to other years. I hear those long corridors of open Os, speaking the language of color.
No more summer sonata, no more crickets. Other beings supply the current of high-wire urgency. Anxiety in the air, human panic. Mud flats of nation and politics. There is no joy in mudsville. No joy in being Cassandra, having watched the hard-muscled tide of the courts over 20 years. It’s all happening – decay.
Americans are tuned to our tale of woe, and I’m one of them. It’s hard to turn away, to oscillate, to equate that with care. The next two weeks – oh, the indignity, and oh, the dignity required to be a bystander on this earth.
