Fall About Color

"Fall About Color" says the identifying sticker: "Colors to wow right now," its slogan, stuck in the midst of "Viola" blossoms, masses of furry white and purple faces, nestling in heart-shaped leaves; a few buds, all anticipation and longing, ready to propel into bloom any minute now, Ready or Not in their bowl outside my door, more shade than sun for their fragility. Water us, they synch, and we'll reward you richly. And so I do-- in to the kitchen for a drench from the sprayer snake, where to my surprise, a small green frog leaps out from his homestead in the moist black earth and the colorful roof that hides him. He spreads out flat on the counter top as frogs are prone to do, and when I coax his return to the pot, he jumps atop the kitchen clock and waits there, expectant until I catch him, carefully in a cloth, shake him free outside my door. I say to his departing back, "I would never harm you, because you're my baby." He shadows me, he's been here before. He's been in evidence at a former residence. He's perched on a ledge of my screened- in porch, placed himself perilously on a door-side vase. He's signed my name on the sacred plane. He's my sign of signs, my medium to the stars who is anything but small. It's my call. In my mind he's all in his emerald incarnation.