Then Fall Again

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Orange, gold, crunch, crisp. Apples cut in clean crescents, burnt marshmallow, smoke caught in the folds of our jackets, in our hair. Luminaria pumpkins like ambassadors of the season, a mustache drawn with scorched cork, then a pilgrim’s hat of black and white. Cranberries bright as blood, a cold drift from beneath the door. Crackle of ice.  Spring, finally: silly to think all this could end, when everything is bursting! Buds furled tight along the branch, wet and new, a girl’s soft hair, hard-soled shoes, rain against the pane and the smell of cut grass, loam and soil and sod, blossoms on the sidewalk, petals on our shoulders and days to spend, days to waste, hours sifted through our fingers like spilled sugar from the bowl. Then summer’s small fruits, hard and sour, hot sidewalk, hot forehead, hot breath of August at the window and still no way to warm you, huddled at the heater, stifling wool and cups of tea and soup and steam, stained sweater, stinking socks, tissues knotted on the floor and all the ways we meant to say goodbye forgotten, no ferry now to Coronado, no starlit swim at Mazatlan.  Nothing matters but to make you warm. Then fall again: orange, gold, crunch, crisp, bones and stones and broken brown leaves. One without you, then all the rest the same.

from Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, first publication The New Yorker, Sept 17 2018