AUTUMN
Fall makes you a present of its colors, the slow fade from gnat-eaten late greenery. It’s his last, and I am his favorite season above all other, he’s exulted in me every year he’s been alive. The yellow butterflies begin in late August (he’s noticed them every year, denotes the advent of autumn by them – they are migrating south) and by the equinox the nights have cooled considerably. A horn sounds near his last birthday. Hurricanes without names loom at the edge of his imagined-and-untaken vacation at the shore.
an end to frog croak
twigs chattering above us
green gone yellow brown
SUMMER
Summer tries to tell her it could easily be the last, that all things are close to ending unless something changes. The pretty swallow that flies in a room’s one window is about to fly back out. But the young see no death auguries in the johnson grass. Who would want to hear, to experience deeply just how tangential and precarious our own existence truly is – the close call on the interstate sometimes informs us – that bland miracles occur moment after moment, keeping us in breath and conversation with others. She studies languages: to do to be to have to go. Her ears do not hear words that limit her actions – this is freedom to her. She stays out late night after night partying at various friends’ apartments, spending her money foolishly. But at night if she stops a moment and goes to the window and opens it, she’ll hear a kind-hearted rendering of the famous Insect Symphony (they named it that as kids in the state park at night), bass notes courtesy of doleful treefrogs, and the brief chill she feels might help aim things differently, might tangle the karmic knots another less fateful way. The heat blasts through August. One night is particularly bad.
remembering drones
gaze up at the soft ceiling
no school, lazy days
WINTER
The snow gradually whitens everything; it is as it was when you were small and easily elated by unusual weather.
You go outside near dusk just as a darkened sun eases past the moving storm’s flat line of cloud and over the lip of the horizon. Burnt pumpkin tinging the high wild drifts out there. You walk further away from the house. Is it now or is it then? you wonder for only a moment.
Later, the moon rises and transforms everything again. A dog screams from far down the street, and the lights come on in each house almost at the same time. Tires whine on ice. A silence big enough to encompass a whole life sweeps down, wind-like, and takes you out.
christmas sun rises
burnt orange across the white
a siren far off…
SPRING
They’re in the car, waiting outside the
library, watching the pollen settle on the hood of a very shiny black Crown
She says: “English sparrows fucking up there on the wires: look!”
“I can just imagine the conversation. ‘Oh Nigel! My Nigel! Come with me to my nest, we’ll tell Trevor he must leave at once – ’ ”
“It’s pretty bad when you start imagining the conversations of birds in copulation.”
“Just my way of enjoying the season. Who knows if it’s not the last springtime I might see?”
“Well who does know?”
“You’re getting all deathy on me again, man. Is it the yoga, the meditation? If so -- ”
“Wait wait wait. Are we not contingent creatures? I will see you tomorrow, but only if someone driving on the wrong side of the road doesn’t blindside me tonight. Or if I don’t flip my car into a pond – ”
“Aw jeez the possibilities are gruesomely endless, dear person. I admit life is a bit chancey, and I take my chances, being as careful but yet as fearless as I can as I meander around. How about that?”
“That’s pretty good. But what if the season – this season, these sparrows fucking, for instance, were tender messages advising me to get my shit together, that time is running closer than I think, that – ”
“Entirely a matter of magical thinking, somewhat neurotic with potential for true psychosis.”
He finishes up: “Oh it’s that crazy to imagine that everything speaks, even seasons and sparrows if we listen and allow ourselves to be open to them, all things sing their own song …?”
memorial day
pink blossoms and white blossoms
still dogs on the road
© 2008 Thomas N. Dennis