Fall Days

Fall is here. Fall has always been here, just beneath everything. It would be better to say, “now everything that is not fall is gone.” All the energies of spring and summer gently sifted away, leaving us with only the essence of the seasons. 

What do we do with these fall days? They come, and I sit on park benches beside crunchy paths and in between half-dressed trees, watching nothing care where it lands. I walk, and direction is allowed to exist only behind me. Everywhere there’s a layeredness, light on shadow on light on shadow. Its muted brightness moves me to ask desperate questions, and I yearn to be lost in swaying cornfields, to crawl into those fuzzy dark spaces, to make a journey under the leaf piles or into the bark. The cloud-corniced skyline calls me to do something with it. I want to mean something, it says; make something of me. I don’t know what. 

What do we do with these fall days? I am pulled out of myself just smelling the flaking air. Let it to crystallize so I may bite it. Let me climb its holds up into an undiscovered hole. The light dances from leaf to leaf, the ground lets out a sleepy sigh as long as days, and all the failing colors twist and wind themselves over the frayed ends of questions I asked as a child and forgot I asked. The shimmering, spiced air and the patchy amber ground: the fading footprints of something that has left a thousand years ago. Being here is not enough, I want to go to the place where all things come from. 

What do we do with these fall days? In all other seasons we face the front-side of the world. But in the fall, things shift slightly, the angle slips, and we sense the other dimension running just behind, deep as the world is wide. A fire burns back there, blocked by every raked yard pile and each jagged tree, and its ashes fall as leaves. Its warmth is expended in the depth, and its light always streams backwards. We are here in the place we are in. There exists a path of mere walking, a direction we ignore. Look at the leaves.