Unseen; untold; an autumn
traveler in soft ascent. Clouds on stilts shed their colors, red and orange and
yellow. Green for the longest month, summer, cold evenings and mornings and warmer
days are changing them. Autumn spirals through its own falling and lone
walkers or strollers two-by-two, led along by dogs, lift off darkened sidewalks
into future skeletal canopies.
Fireflies vanish into dormancy, returned to the ebb of a
common rhythm. Spied from a high place, neighborhood windows perform those old
firefly duties…luminous markers where life moves in a minor key, horny, wired
for survival. Semaphores of mating wholly dependent on the dark.
Regrets? Watch their patterns. Embarrassments? Too many
to count individually; but note their ectoplasmic blush, spectral yellow-green,
scanning the backyard’s expanse like dots roving at behest of a laser pointer. Somewhere
a cat crouches, ass-up, tail trashing, prepped to pounce. When it pounces,
embarrassment caught, it dies between claws as shame. Those too, many of them…a
light show turned to late-night inventory.
The fallow times are water, they settle at the lowest
possible level. Gravity leads it wherever. People also with their own gravity
and their own fallow, every year piss several times their weight in water. Epiphanies
die, become morals; morals die, become preferences; preferences fairweather as
blood-pressure and besides, epiphanies are for mortals who court a single point
of focus, at expense of their own selves perpetually scattering, children on
the hunt for lightning bugs, not in summer but winter.
Snow in massive lazy descent, months torn to shreds and
confettied. These the new bugs, downgrades from lightning. Future kids run out to
chase and catch and cup them. Life in them changes form hidden among the heat
of such cradles…melt into something akin to themselves, themselves shorn of
human shape or purpose, the most mutable element pressed to the lips of the most
conscious one. They’re gone a while, inside one house or another, then a day
passes and they emerge again. On and on, without fear of what it might make of them,
keeping constant company with mindless falling. Untold; unseen; and more
honest for it; but what uses could there be for such honesty?
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