Fall is a time of strange promptings, even for those of us who never succumb to vagabondage. If I happen to spot decades-old spiderwebs like wings of dust in a corner of the basement, I glance quickly away & reach for the jar of screws. And when the green is gone, when it has leached from the last of the leaves & the ground is ankle-deep in gloria mundi, I want to know the trees as Indians once did: from the flavor of their ashes. I want to learn restlessness from the natives, stand still enough to become a landmark for a mob of lekking gnats in Indian summer. I want the little brown bat in my portico to find a hibernaculum no other bat knows about, where he can hang all winter like a stilled pendulum, safe from the killer fungus the color of snow. I want my bootprints to collect the November rain & freeze: windows for whatever Argus might still be with us, insomniac, going over & over the dwindling flocks.
The Amtrak’s
quick double blast—
then cricket cricket.
Terrific, Dave. I love this.
(Looks like you jumped your ‘decades-old spiderwebs like wings of dust in a corner of the basement’ in a good two days before my cochleae and ghost owl pellets!)
Thanks. Yeah, we were on similar wavelengths this week, but you took it much farther, I think.