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Posts Tagged ‘autumn’

The Mirror

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 17, 2025| 12 Comments »

Overnight, every red leaf on the maple tree
has fallen to the ground and formed
an imperfect pool of red around
the solemn trunk, the dark bare limbs.
This is how it was the day you died.
In an instant, the tree of me went
from radiance to nakedness.
Impossible to hide.
Years later, I see what I couldn’t
see then—how beautiful to be that bare
when all that is lost is still so close,
when the limbs of the body
still remember the exact texture
and weight of what they once held.
How sacred that nakedness,
that opens us to the world.
I have grown so many new leaves.
That sacredness has never left.

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Snapdragons in Autumn

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 3, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
They no longer bloom,
but the snapdragons bring
an extravagance of dark green
to the garden otherwise bare.
I almost missed this pleasure,
poised as I was to rip them
from the soil when frost took
all the flowers. But there
is something past bloom
in me that thrills now
to see them there, growing
for the sake of growing,
tall and fully leafed out. Grow
while you can, they seem to say.
Until it’s all over, don’t you
ever stop with your growing.

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While Thinking About Letting Go

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 16, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
I hold a sunflower in my heart,
not in golden bloom, but filled
with small, dry seeds,
a desiccated husk of a disk, brittle
and brown. I hold it here
as a reminder some gifts
look unwanted at first.
I remember the autumn afternoon
I went to pull the dead remains
from the garden, then watched
as the Stellar’s jays landed
atop the tall dark stalks
and feasted. So I let the row
stand instead of clearing it away.
In my attempts to remove
what seemed no longer useful,
I almost missed this chance
to see the Stellar’s Jays balance
on the tips of the plants,
their bodies a blue exultation of wing.
What else have I tried to clear
from my heart too soon? How
easy to miss what is still nourishing.
Out my window, the jays gather
at the banquet of what is dead.
I am learning the wisdom of holding.
 

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Calendaring

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 5, 2025| 4 Comments »

since I last held you
I measure the days 
in fallen leaves—
great brown mounds
beneath empty branches

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As It All Comes Down

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
On the day his brother died,
we walked, mostly silent.
The old aspen trees were tall
and dead. In a meadow, we found
a single yellow flower where almost
all else was brown. The air carried
the wild scent of elk, dank, sweet.
And the wind made of dry grass
an epiphany of sound.
But it was the quiet landscape
inside us that was most changed.
In a voice so bare I could hardly hear,
he said, These are the days
that bring us closer together.

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What Is Here

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 16, 2024| 2 Comments »


 
Midsummer, she stood in the midst
of deep blue delphinium
and did not move. Stood
until she became delphinium.
Till she petalled and pollened
and blued. Oh joy in the flesh
that forgets it is bound to an I.
Joy in the flesh that remembers
it’s part of it all. Months later,
she returns to the stems, tall
and brown and dead.
Did she really believe
things would not change?
This is the way she learns
what she wants the most:
To be open to falling in love
with the world as it is—
beyond hope, beyond wish,
beyond memory.
To not mistake love
for the object of love.
To stand in the midst
of what is brittle and gone
and fall in love with
exactly what is here.

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Subtraction

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 15, 2024| 7 Comments »


 
For months now, the days darken.
This signals the trees to stop making chlorophyll,
and, in its absence, other pigments in the leaves
can be seen. Yellow flavonols. Orange carotenoids.
Red anthocyanins. They adorn each tree
with such radiance, such honest treasure—
a beauty that was always there
concealed beneath the green.
 
Touch me, I want to say to the darkness.
or perhaps more truly, I say to the self,
be touched, be touched as if you are a tree.
Let what you know of yourself break down.
What hidden gold might be revealed then?
What amber? What astonishing vermillion?

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I Couldn’t See the Elk, But

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 15, 2024| 11 Comments »




I smelled them, that sweet,
viscous scent that falls somewhere
between musk and vanilla,
between urine and cut grass.
The kind of scent that makes
me crinkle my nose in almost
disgust, then inhale deeply
as if the body can’t get enough.
Primal scent. Animal scent.
Scent I can’t find inside walls.
Scent that reminds me I, too,
am a creature. And there
beneath the blue autumn sky
I felt reclaimed by the earth,
reclaimed by the goldening
meadow, reclaimed by the boggy
wallow in the valley’s shallow cleft,
as if I might leave behind forever
the land of pavement and frying pans,
car troubles and saran wrap.
As if I, too, might roll around
in that slick stretch of mud
and become who I was
before I knew how to want,
how to thank, how to plan,
how to pray.

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This Is How

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 25, 2023| 8 Comments »


It’s the chill air, say the scientists,
that allows the nose to delineate
the musky smell of autumn,
not like the warm summer air
that traps and mashes
all the aromatic molecules together.
No, it’s the constricting nature of cold
that lets us pick out the sweet loam
of dried grass and peaty scent of sugars
breaking down in the leaves.
 
But it’s memory that says,
Isn’t this smell wonderful.
It’s the amygdala that relates it
to the childhood joy
of skipping through gutters of oak leaves
and the adult joy of jumping
in great piles of cottonwood leaves
with my son.
 
In this golden moment,
I’m every age I’ve ever been in the fall,
and every version of me basks
in low autumn light. This is how
I breathe in the fragrance of death
and decay and moldering,
and think isn’t it wonderful, this life.

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Shifting Purpose

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 24, 2023| 7 Comments »




Yesterday, the thing to do
   was to rake the golden leaves
    from the grass and gather them
       into huge untidy piles
  for my husband to pull away.
   Today the invitation is
to not rake the leaves.
   To sit in the grass and feel myself
    folded into an unmanaged beauty.
  The invitation is to admire
     their infinite shades of yellow
   and brown—to notice
how some are speckled,
  some torn, some brittle,
      some still impossibly soft.
   If some part of me
     feels duty bound
  to straighten the world,
she is not here now.
   I want nothing but to sprawl
 in disorder, to feel only delight
      as the wind releases leaves
   from the autumn trees,
want to relish how, with no politic,
the leaves dance to the ground.
  Want to know myself as unruly,
  one who finds joy in the rustling,
one who thrills in the glorious mess.

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