Having Felled It

The warmth no longer comes it seems to only leave. The furry ones, all caught in hypnotic disbelief: hardening ground's taken root where once gardening grounds (forsaken, mute) were once and again makin' fruit. Each beast, shaking like a leaf (though, truth be told I've only ever seen 'em dance) as if to compel the sun to sidle up 'n stay a bit. The butterflies are all turned to windblown, drying leaves. The biting clouds of gnats are now the biting cold of early flakes. All hatched and reared (the secret thrush, the ungainly, splashtering loon, the burly snakes) as evening hurries home to be home for the night. It's so early, so late. The fatted robin's gone just as the field mice hid from barn-now-lapcat. This constellation of crows, a raucous perch, tried that hiding ploy: their clotted knotted silhouetted faux-leaf blackening hide out where the leaves’d lived but crows are not meant to blot the low sun as they’d plotted... And so it was as so its been since Oh, so ever since - a bird of prey, answered their plaintive caws with painted claws - a fracturous startle from above a crash! a cry! a scattering! one down, one murder still. Nothing softens, nothing greens. No flowering as Southern urges force flocks into making V-lines. Each nest left: all break routines. Summer is souring, as frost emerges and last-one-picked, the pines - lefties left in left field; icing soon, their needles their shield and, the coach never intervenes... The light more slow to show more tugged and bent to slant. The sunshafts seem to push the cold ahead as snow by plows. And for our part we too as well well, we turn away, turn indoors. We turn our dreams to make-it-through this. We turn our collars up, and too, our eyes to floors. We turn our (each seems to) thoughts inside this shell not towards Inner but rather, of course, truly from- far and away from the Cold & Falling, closing crisp. How unlike the Scholar's Cup! Our husks indoors, our thoughts follow but burrow deeper still. Don't blame the light for not keeping company so deep where hides a fearful, frigid 'you.' It's Autumn all turns on one point. It's Autumn Fall burns on. It's Autumn sun burns on one point (of light.) I have never felled so alive as now.