Intentional Reflections

The Blue Chair color as deeply satisfying as Abbo's Alley fall leaves.

Fall Color ABCedarian: O

OCHRE AND OLIVE

Emptied Purse

Like Coins, November
by Elisabeth Klise Von Zerneck

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now
and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost

it glittered like a dime. The autumn boughs
and blackened branches wore a somber gloss

that whispered tails to me, not heads. I read
memorial columns in their trunks; their leaves

spelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head . . . 
in penny profile, Lincoln-like (one sleeve,

one eye) but even it was turning tails
as russet leaves lay spent across the trails.

Annual Wish

If only fall lasted all year long.

What Fall There Is Is Falling

Leaves flicker like gems in candlelight.

I am grateful for even this bit of citrine and garnet, sapphire and emerald.

Full Circle

I
Down, in the book, I read this: 

"I was intrigued to learn of a novel Swedish solution to human burial. In a country where cemetery space is at such a premium that older bodies are dug up and reburied more deeply so that second- and third-story tenants can be installed in the same plot, the practical Swedes have now developed a system for composting human remains.

"They start by freezing the corpse in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Once solid, it is easily shattered into tiny frozen pieces, nugget-sized, by ultra-sound waves or, somewhat less palatably, a hammer mill, a process likened by one proponent to that of making chipped beef. The nuggets are then freeze-dried and placed, with a starter of bacteria, in a biodegradable box to be buried as fertilizer for whatever plant you place above your still-serviceable 'loved one.' In my view, this is as about as close as we're ever going to get to reincarnation: our very atoms coursing through the venous leaves of, for example, a long-lived oak." -- Hold Still by Sally Mann, page 419

II
Then up, I saw this.

Lake Cheston ABCedarian: R

R is for REFLECTION, RELATIONSHIPS, and REVERENCE

Wind on Water on Leaves

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind."

To which I would add this: wind-waved water ripples the wind-waved leaves.

Caravaggesque Water

A small patch of pond: water, leaves, algae, silt, bubbles, grass, sky reflection, something oily suspended and shining on the surface.

Seeing it, I could not look away, but sat in mud, transfixed, as I had once stood before Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew one cold afternoon in Rome's Contarelli Chapel of the Church of San Luigi dei Francesci.  

The play of dark and light, the energy of light-colored strands like spider silk (but surely not, since submerged and weaving through the water; algae tendrils, perhaps?) reminding me of a painting's craquelure.

I love art, and I love museums, and I love the way the lake sometimes becomes both.

October Is the Month for Painted Leaves

So said Thoreau:

"October is the month for painted leaves.  Their rich glow now flashes round the world."

So says the water.

So say I.

The Only Color

another rainy day:
a scattering of leaves
in the shallows.

Rain, rain,
please go
away and come
back (maybe)
some other day.

Fall On Me Today Between Car and Mailbox

Fall
by Edward Hirsch

Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences‐ a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer's Sprawling past and winter's hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork; the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets,
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.