Quill & Parchment: Autumn

Autumn
By John Macker

Last summer carved the shadows into pulp.
There was a sexy, hushed lush
lone wolf feel to it,
some days had the staying power
of an elder,
some days took on the opacity
of dreams, I’d wake up to the sky cursing a
blue streak, the moonlight
faded from the imponderably frozen
galaxies,
its magic elusive.

The character of the hemisphere now is
indifferent to the mundane. The
clouds seem more feral, they
bunch together impassioned and com-
pressed, always moving in
oncoming cadres of whispered winter.
They compose themselves on the fly.
The birds jewel them with appropriate
nuances. These
feelings of change are serial igniters. My
life becomes infused with unfamiliar clarity.
Didn’t I feel this way last year at this time?
Wasn’t the smile of the light just as mercurial?
Wasn’t there the same organic sheen of ex-
pectation painted over every living thing? I
Wonder.

I recite the itinerant images splashed across the
landscape: harvest orange moon’s sojurn solo,
shrinking, whitening as it rises belly up above
the scrub desert into the upper reaches
beyond the sky. Streams
brown, flatten out¸ the dry
rocks exposed like scones.
Tohees poke and flutter
at the surface as the emollient
twilight silence
folds around them.
I read John Koethe’s words:
A writer’s secret is an uncorrupted world.

Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to myself in
a foreign tongue. That which is remote within me,
some memory, some flotsam, which is
inert but still beautiful or enigmatic and has
taken up residence in the soul or is revealed
by proximity,
issues such clarity
this October.

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