October's cup:

golden ginkgo
cocktail
of sense memory.

October's Fruit

bleeds the season of intense light.

October Ingot:

a leaf
stamped
MOOZ NONAC.

October Pond Water

blinks.

October Gold-leaf

burnishes leaves
flattening
picture plane
sky.

October's Hudson River School

comes to Sewanee.

October Gift

"When will you give me a picture?" Boo asked when I showed her the tree snaps on my laptop.

"They might not really be sharply focused," I said.

"When will I get a picture?" she asked.

That was Saturday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon I took her the collage: "Three Cheers for Boo's Tree!"

She cheered.

October Fickleness

In half an hour, light appeared and disappeared, wind blew and stilled, clouds drifted and raced, leaves shimmered and wafted, Green's View shifted its view like the weather -- unable (or unwilling) to let fall fall.

October's Hilling and Daling

October Web

At least one spider October as much as I.

A Cheer for October

Boo's tree is so admired that during one fall football game (her house is across from the field) the Sewanee cheerleaders turned to face it and cheered for it (or so Boo says).

I cheer for it every fall day.

Today especially.

October's Woods

invite walking to see what's below and stopping to see what's above.

October View

At Morgan's Steep,
a few trees flame
against nickel sky
and undulating plateau.

October Sky

wears vapor trails like pin stripes in early morningphotograph by my friend Lynne V.

October butterflies

are few: today I saw one large white fluttering wildly like a drunk driver; one Gulf Fritillary, a bit too jumpy for the camera; and one zooming Spicebush Swallowtail.

But the skippers still flicker, filling up on fuchsia flowers, before the temperature turns for good.

October afternoon

sun spotlights individual leaves, transmuting them into gels of gobsmackingly luminous color.

October Wind

rolls like whistling waves, turning the yard into a humming surf of leaf and bird.

October Sugar

lime, blood orange, tangerine
leaves
plump the blue bowl of sky.

October Nuts!

My neighbor's sons have gathered acorns within a broken-limb corral, while I have been gathering baseball-sized black walnuts into heaps on weeds.

Question: where are the dadgum squirrels?

October's Last

Gulf Fritillaries race through on their way to somewhere else.

For a moment, everything blazes with fall.

October Sussurus

The conversation of leaves underfoot and overhead makes welcome company on an afternoon walk.

October Foulard

Tired zinnia petals --
chiffon foulard unraveling.

October Shadows

incise gravestone words more deeply, dapple already dappled stone -- mossy, algaed, sprouting fungus and small blossoms.

The lanes, leaf-littered, run in and out of light, the canopy of trees dribbling acorns and twigs, parting every now and then to reveal electric blue sky.

The cemetery houses known and unknown, even the famous, but it's the stones that name the living as well as the dead that deepen the shadows even further. A wife who will be buried there next to her husband, a mother who will join her daughter in a twin grave -- these cause me to linger, perhaps because I know the living who will join their dead one day.But sky beckons, and I move out into light.

October's Last Bursts

of flower are wild and wildly luxuriant.

Reminiscent of the passion flowers of mid-summer and prescient of crocus to come in late winter, late purple aster stuns, spinning its own heat, sparkling like sun-struck water in Lake Cheston.

October Silence

Early morning. Two deer rest on the grassy patch between my and my neighbor's house. When I part the curtain to take a grainy photo, the older doe looks at me, ears perked. I shoot, pour tea in the kitchen, return, and note they have disappeared as silently as they arrived.

October: the month of silent deer.

October Light

Morning silence
but for tapping keys,
whirring hard drive;
tea breathing
in stoneware cup,
screen glowing.

My doppelganger
appears projected,
umber shadow
shimmering:
October light.

October Worship

Lucy prostrates herself at the altar of Our Lady of Radiant Heat.
October has arrived.

October Rust

burnishes and dusts leaves gold and bronze.

The Month of Red, Too

The burning bush
burns on Tennessee Avenue.

October's Vault of Blue

Every flower still blooming lifts its face to the vault of blue.