Autumn haibun

This entry is part 17 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

 

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.

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2 Replies to “Autumn haibun”

  1. 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!)

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