You wait all year for this moment.

Summer is a frantic plunge compared to this. You are compelled all summer to go outside, enjoy the long light, the deep cool evenings where the moths flutter and the bats hunt over your head.

But now, everything is different.

The equinox has come and gone. The time has changed. And the clouds and mists have wandered back, settling in as if they'd never forsaken you in the first place. Over the water, in the evening, you can see the fog clinging to the edges of Alki.

It's time to retreat indoors.

You buy candles, things that smell like cinnamon, and apple cider. You weed the flowerbeds one last time and put down another light coating of mulch, just enough to patch the spots the weeds leave behind. You buy bulbs and hope the squirrels don't eat all of them like they did last year. This is your goodbye to the garden, the last caress until the spring comes and brings with it what winter leaves behind.

You begin to drink tea. The coffee shops begin carrying all the lovely holiday drinks--the peppermint lattes, the hot apple cider. Your hands are cold and a mug is the right size to warm and fill them, and you discover that Tazo Wild Sweet Orange is perhaps even better than the Passion flavor you're so fond of. It seems more correct for fall, really. The holidays smell like oranges and cinnamon.

You buy notebooks. Better yet, you begin writing, in your silver pen in your sketchbook. Doodles begin appearing next to your poems--a bonsai tree with little Buddha next to the words, "my heart swept in the still breeze, the bonsai in the window." And you start to think that perhaps you're going to live after all.

You meet a woman named Beth who is inspiration in a green hoodie. And you start to think about finishing your damned chapbook, the one that's been laid out forever and just needs a good cover. and you mutter about the cover and mutter and mutter and realize that yes, you do have a good idea, you just have to see how it looks, and then you realize you not only have a good layout idea you have an idea that uses vellum, and since you are passionately in love with vellum (no paper-like material before or since has ever been more wonderful, more...transparent) this immediately sounds like a Good Idea. And you have a friend who knows how to hand-stitch books, and this also sounds like a good idea.

And all on your own you come up with the idea of a little envelope attached to the book with a little poem inside, and this sounds like an amazingly wonderful idea. and before you know it you are buying bookbinding supplies and plotting to get your hands on vellum (since you need several different kinds to see which kind will work with your design) and there's such a flurry of activity that you get home and you're tired, and you eat and you read some and then you come upstairs.

The light is fading now right at five, right before you leave work in your wonderful cape-with-sleeves that a friend made for you, and you're hoping you sleep tonight. The buses come and go and nobody bothers you, and you haul your veggies down the hill.

You want--you're not sure what. Something. Fall's gift is the harvest, the bringing-inside, and you have lain fallow all summer, waiting for the rains. You want the river to run full again, the cold to come and waken you, the dying sun to lull you to sleep though the red leaves of the maple.

This is the time you call the feathered fall towards the solstice--the plunge towards the dark, taken this year far more joyfully than any year before. You know that come February, you will be tired of rain, of mist, of the bare trees and the waiting. But until then, until winter has overstayed its generous welcome, you fall.

And are lifted towards the waning light.

after long silence

The notebooks are dusty, and it takes
some time and scrap paper to discover
which of the pens have not yet dried out.

And then there is the matter of the words;
a slow sluggish river rises, obscuring subjects,
prepositions; verbs are jagged rocks
that do not bear thinking about. Meanings
are murky fish, mostly blind and shy.

The landscape is sere, seared by the constant sun
and the secret spaces are gasping for water.

But at the edge of the iron river, I find
the weeds growing, small flowers open,
and in the distance the thrumming of drums
speaking once more; finally, they
call to each other, the ground curling into itself,
the rains arriving at last.

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