Gathering

The long shadows are growing cooler. Soon there will be places where the light will no longer reach and the river will wear its autumn coat of leaves. My walks are getting shorter, contracting within a circle, tightening in an ever diminishing circumference around my home. I feel a hurry in my mind, the need to gather and stash what I can before being confined to a room. I grab swatches of sky, reflections, the shapes of trees, anything and everything to stock memory with a store of stuff a poem can nibble on when locked away in a dark that seems to have a no beyond.